Rob and Dave and Life
The good news is dear, the airbags work!
So, we travel, so we smoke, so we stand in front of buildings a lot.
We've seen you drive. We've seen the way you pay attention on the road. And, frankly, we're scared by what the future holds for cars in the next five years. Rather than get up on the fifth floor ledge (with that great view), which might be the safest place to be right now, we're going to grab the grille by the horns and tackle the future of driving.
Short Snappers for Five: How many of you have: Talked on a cellphone while driving Put on makeup while driving: Ate some sort of burger/burrito/sushi while driving: Argued with a friend/loved one/ex-bitch while driving: Gotten dressed while driving: Done the nasty while driving: Read a map or newspaper while driving Please circle your responses on your monitor with a grease pencil, or dry-erase marker.
You are like the rest of us who have done at least one or two of the above, and in all unscientific surveys like this, you are a Bad Driver. (Those who have managed to do all seven at the same time are contortionists as well as inattentive lovers)
Simple math comes into play here. 30 mph is 44 feet per second. Three-quarters of a second is a median reaction time for an attentive driver to recognize a hazard and react to it. Now, add an unfolded road map in the way, mentally, and the reaction time goes up to nearly two seconds, or almost 88 feet. Imagine what the reaction time would be if you were reading your email on a dashboard mounted LCD display and navigating to e-Bay to bid on that rubber bustier at the same time as driving your car in the usual traffic you face going to work. This is called a rear end collision. (The good news is dear, the airbags work!)
North Americans don't seem to have the attention span that driving a car requires as it is. Quite often you will see North Americans with more than two sources of input wandering off into the desert to become vulture bait. Obviously cars don't have enough stuff yet, so lets put more stuff in the car and really mess with the operator's attention deficit disorder!
Electronic maps, digitized voices, GPS, the Web, a PDA, a video for the kids, a fridge and a beverage holder the size of a frat keg. Not enough yet. How about a heads up Infrared Display? Airbags in all directions, including some that port to other dimensions? Enough yet? Probably not. We've left out the five-dimensional dancing hula girl ornament on the dashboard.
The brutish reality is we have too many toys distracting us in our cars today and it hits us in our wallets as the premiums we pay for car insurance. As well, there are the usual bad things that happen to people when objects with serious mass collide with other objects with serious mass. Newton didn't consider cars did he? I suspect Newton is glad a Hyundai didn't give him the Big Idea.
Some suggestions from the Robaddave Labs:
Recurrent testing. Every five years you get to reapply for your driver's license and take the road test all over again. Driving is not a Constitutional Right and we might weed out or retrain some of the really dangerous nimrods.
Graduated Licensing: You don't get to fly a 747 just because you got your VFR private pilot ticket. You get to work up to piloting the Jumbo and it takes years. In our home province Graduated Licensing has reduced accidents rather nicely, thanks.
Cellphones can't be used in vehicles while the vehicle is in motion. You get a call, pull over, or send it to voice-mail.
Reading, fornicating, typing, surfing the web, debugging code or rebooting your GPS while driving gets you a special penalty. The cop who pulls you over gets to give you one good rap across your knuckles with the nightstick, to call you a dumbfuck and to hand you a $1000 ticket. Left-lane bandits (also known as the Anti-Destination League), are those sluggards who squat in the left lane with the cruise control on pegged at exactly the speed limit should be ticketed for not looking in their rearview more than once a decade. Thank God we're not allowed anti-tank weapons in our cars. (But Rob really, really wants one)
Just to feed the pot, here is a true idiot driver story: Driving along 417 to Montreal (American equivalent: I-90) pass a clapped out Tercel doing 70 miles per. Driver in left lane, with the cruise control on. Seat reclined, reading a book, steering with her knee and probably drinking a Maple Nut Crunch coffee. The Bad Angel said to tap the right rear quarter panel of her car and send her off into the trees. The Good Angel said, no, just get the hell away from this accident waiting to happen. The Good Angel won. This time.
Tell us your idiot driver horror story and you could get mentioned here! Our email is robanddave@whatthefuck.com. No prizes, but we do get a laugh out of them and will pop the best ones up in a future column.
And, you can now erase your choices in the survey from your monitor. Used a permanent marker? Umm...do you drive?
By the way, greywarden, we want a column about wildebeests with latex fetishes.
Enjoy the ride!
Rob and Dave
We've seen you drive. We've seen the way you pay attention on the road. And, frankly, we're scared by what the future holds for cars in the next five years. Rather than get up on the fifth floor ledge (with that great view), which might be the safest place to be right now, we're going to grab the grille by the horns and tackle the future of driving.
Short Snappers for Five: How many of you have: Talked on a cellphone while driving Put on makeup while driving: Ate some sort of burger/burrito/sushi while driving: Argued with a friend/loved one/ex-bitch while driving: Gotten dressed while driving: Done the nasty while driving: Read a map or newspaper while driving Please circle your responses on your monitor with a grease pencil, or dry-erase marker.
You are like the rest of us who have done at least one or two of the above, and in all unscientific surveys like this, you are a Bad Driver. (Those who have managed to do all seven at the same time are contortionists as well as inattentive lovers)
Simple math comes into play here. 30 mph is 44 feet per second. Three-quarters of a second is a median reaction time for an attentive driver to recognize a hazard and react to it. Now, add an unfolded road map in the way, mentally, and the reaction time goes up to nearly two seconds, or almost 88 feet. Imagine what the reaction time would be if you were reading your email on a dashboard mounted LCD display and navigating to e-Bay to bid on that rubber bustier at the same time as driving your car in the usual traffic you face going to work. This is called a rear end collision. (The good news is dear, the airbags work!)
North Americans don't seem to have the attention span that driving a car requires as it is. Quite often you will see North Americans with more than two sources of input wandering off into the desert to become vulture bait. Obviously cars don't have enough stuff yet, so lets put more stuff in the car and really mess with the operator's attention deficit disorder!
Electronic maps, digitized voices, GPS, the Web, a PDA, a video for the kids, a fridge and a beverage holder the size of a frat keg. Not enough yet. How about a heads up Infrared Display? Airbags in all directions, including some that port to other dimensions? Enough yet? Probably not. We've left out the five-dimensional dancing hula girl ornament on the dashboard.
The brutish reality is we have too many toys distracting us in our cars today and it hits us in our wallets as the premiums we pay for car insurance. As well, there are the usual bad things that happen to people when objects with serious mass collide with other objects with serious mass. Newton didn't consider cars did he? I suspect Newton is glad a Hyundai didn't give him the Big Idea.
Some suggestions from the Robaddave Labs:
Recurrent testing. Every five years you get to reapply for your driver's license and take the road test all over again. Driving is not a Constitutional Right and we might weed out or retrain some of the really dangerous nimrods.
Graduated Licensing: You don't get to fly a 747 just because you got your VFR private pilot ticket. You get to work up to piloting the Jumbo and it takes years. In our home province Graduated Licensing has reduced accidents rather nicely, thanks.
Cellphones can't be used in vehicles while the vehicle is in motion. You get a call, pull over, or send it to voice-mail.
Reading, fornicating, typing, surfing the web, debugging code or rebooting your GPS while driving gets you a special penalty. The cop who pulls you over gets to give you one good rap across your knuckles with the nightstick, to call you a dumbfuck and to hand you a $1000 ticket. Left-lane bandits (also known as the Anti-Destination League), are those sluggards who squat in the left lane with the cruise control on pegged at exactly the speed limit should be ticketed for not looking in their rearview more than once a decade. Thank God we're not allowed anti-tank weapons in our cars. (But Rob really, really wants one)
Just to feed the pot, here is a true idiot driver story: Driving along 417 to Montreal (American equivalent: I-90) pass a clapped out Tercel doing 70 miles per. Driver in left lane, with the cruise control on. Seat reclined, reading a book, steering with her knee and probably drinking a Maple Nut Crunch coffee. The Bad Angel said to tap the right rear quarter panel of her car and send her off into the trees. The Good Angel said, no, just get the hell away from this accident waiting to happen. The Good Angel won. This time.
Tell us your idiot driver horror story and you could get mentioned here! Our email is robanddave@whatthefuck.com. No prizes, but we do get a laugh out of them and will pop the best ones up in a future column.
And, you can now erase your choices in the survey from your monitor. Used a permanent marker? Umm...do you drive?
By the way, greywarden, we want a column about wildebeests with latex fetishes.
Enjoy the ride!
Rob and Dave
robanddave have been around since the beginning, and we're not just talking about whatthefuck.com. rob and dave are your every day couple of guys who want to share their life with you. if you disagree, get offended, or simply have something you need to pick, e-mail them at robanddave@whatthefuck.com.