Cars are becoming iPads

Older cars had buttons everywhere, and people understood what they did. Nowadays, cars are filled with unnecessary technology that half the drivers don’t even use, either because it’s hidden behind multiple taps on the center console screen or because the tech is so cluttered that people don’t even understand what’s going on inside their own car.

Many new cars are filled with sensors and cameras everywhere, whether it comes to the rear, front, or even mirrors. The backup camera is standard at this point, especially for making it easier to park, but the front is stretching it. Cars that sometimes have these cameras use them to drive themselves, also known as Tesla’s self-driving. Although it seems like a good thing, it’s making drivers extremely lazy, as many drivers are often using this self-driving feature to simply scroll or sleep by tricking many cameras inside the car into thinking they’re paying attention to the road, making them an extreme hazard on the road.

Some technology is barely touched because it’s so complicated that drivers don’t want to risk breaking something; it’s locked behind multiple taps on the interior screen that’s as big as a tablet, or it’s simply locked behind a subscription many manufacturers are charging for nowadays. There are multiple examples of features found in the average new car where they go completely unused because of those reasons, not because they’re useless; it’s because they’re hidden very far back. You have to manually take time to search for them, and most people don’t want to spend the time on that.

Cars are including a lot of technology that’s going unused despite the price you paid to “include” them. Not only is this technology making drivers lazy and a hazard on the road, but it’s also causing prices to skyrocket. Prices don’t just apply to the dealer price, which is already expensive; they’re also causing insurance companies to raise rates. These sensors and cameras are very expensive and not cheap to replace, and once people start buying cars equipped with them and getting into accidents despite the safety features, the rates will start to increase as well, making it difficult to insure a car affordably.

If one of these pieces of technology decides to break down, it’s not a simple lightbulb replacement you can get from an auto parts shop for about 10 dollars. You are pushed in your face on every screen in the car telling you to head to your nearest dealership to get that sensor fixed, only to figure out it’s costing hundreds of dollars to fix a sensor for a tow hitch on a family sedan that you didn’t even know existed until now where the speedometer was nagging you to get it fixed.

Back then, cars were simple. There were buttons with a symbol that was universally understood, such as turning the dial for the AC to how you’d like it or plugging in your phone to put on the GPS. The simple cost of owning the car was low because it got you from point A to point B without issue. Now, they want you to connect your phone wirelessly to their iPad with a complimentary car just to figure out how to get home, trying to get you to navigate through multiple pages of apps just to turn down the AC by a few degrees or dry out your wallet for unnecessary things you didn’t even know were in the car when you bought it, or you simply can’t use because it’s locked behind a monthly subscription.

Brian Trinh is a sophomore member of the Multimedia Journalism Class

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Brian Trinh

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