Are gadgets making drivers lazy or are they really here to help us? An increasing number of manufacturers are creating gadgets every year to accompany the dials and lights found on all car dashboards.
Gadgets have been invented that do everything from dim headlights for the benefit of oncoming traffic, guidi cars into parking spaces, alarming a sound an alarm when it’s vehicle drifts across the road.
At a show in Scotland, Ford have released their latest gadget for all to see, a blow up seatbelt made for rear passengers to improve protection when the vehicle is involved in an accident.
Technology is even in development that allows vehicles to communicate with one another via WiFi, informing other vehicles of accident hotspots such as dangerous junctions.
Such advancements in technology has led some people to question the true value of such gadgets. Are they truly the life savers that their inventors claim? Or are they in fact responsible for the creation of a generation of lazy motorists who are becoming incapable of spotting and preventing potential hazards without the aid of modern equipment? In the past car manufacturers have concentrated their efforts on secondary safety systems such as air bags, but are now shifting their attentions to prevention of the accident in the first instance.
Will these gadgets in fact function as a distraction to drivers, instead of as the preventative measure that they were intended as? One of the developers of the gadgets advised that they were not created to take over the role of the driver, but to aid them, helping prevent the occurrence of accidents, stopping just short of motorists becoming reliant upon them.
Kathleen Braidwood, a road safety officer for Scotland said:
“The more gadgets a driver uses the less challenging for a driver, this makes them more reliant on gadgets to get them out of tricky situations, we then have an issue of a drivers inability to cope if the gadgets fail on them in a situation of this kind.”