By Ken Lass
If you’re like me you fight the battle with junk email every day. It begins once you purchase something on the internet. Your address hits the cosmos and suddenly your inbox is bursting with solicitations for everything from super glue to breast enhancement.
In a typical day I will be informed about affordable healthcare plans, the best auto warranty deal, super bargains on hotel rooms, and how something I am eating for breakfast might be causing me to have early dementia. Apparently there are new options for handling my credit card debt, my eyelashes aren’t long enough, and there’s something I can add to my coffee that will burn my belly fat 690 percent faster.
Clearly they don’t check your marital status before sending out their spam. A lady named Veronica wants to know if I am lonely. Another site called Elite Singles asks if I am searching for that special someone. Actually, I am. I’m searching for that special someone who can stop these emails.
My brother Bob has a similar problem, only the source of his emails is even more curious. They are from his car. Bob just bought a brand new Lexus RX 350. It’s loaded with nearly every state of the art gadget you can think of, and it wants to communicate with its owner. Often. The car will email you if you leave a window open, or if you leave the sun roof open, or if you leave a package on the seat, or if you are due for maintainance, or for any number of other reasons. Bob says the most frustrating thing is you can’t email it back to tell it to stop.
It also talks to you, sometimes rather stridently. Bob says the car verbally scolded him when he briefly took his hands off the steering wheel. One time it informed him as to what was in his glove compartment. It can also hold you hostage. If you try to get out of the car when there is traffic coming past, it will refuse to let you out.
And then there are the beeps. A wide range of beeps, double beeps, long and short beeps. It sounds like Artoo-Detoo, the robot from Star Wars, is in the back seat. The trick is to figure out what each beep is trying to tell you. They could mean anything, from a door left ajar, to a military coup in Bolivia. Bob hasn’t mastered it yet.
Sometimes the car can be downright bossy. It reads the stop signs and street lights in front of you, and will activate the brakes if it doesn’t think you are slowing down quickly enough. Don’t like to wear a seat belt? Too bad. The driver seat won’t adjust until you buckle up. Nor will it adjust if you have an item on the floor behind it.
The side mirrors sense if you’re in a tight spot and will contract on their own. It’s almost impossible to steal this car. Each potential driver must create a profile on the app, and the vehicle won’t start unless it recognizes you. Any intruder will encounter a cascade of beeps, and, probably, another email will be sent to Bob.
Of course, all of these features are designed for safety, and most all of them can be turned off…..theoretically. All the operating instructions can be found on the dashboard display screen, which is large enough to service a small movie theater. But here, too, there is a challenge. You have to decipher the alphabet soup that describes the systems. There is LCA (Lane Change Assistance), DCC (Dynamic Cruise Control), and PDA (Proactive Driving Assistant). There is also LDA, AHS, PCA and more. Fortunately, Bob is smart enough to learn all the acronyms. I would be too SMC (Short-term Memory Challenged) to learn all that stuff.
Technological complexity aside, Bob loves the car and I can see why. I got a ride in it recently and it moves like a dream down the road. You know how most of the newer cars have a rear view camera that shows you the mailbox you just knocked down? Well, the Lexus goes further. Somehow it shows you a birds-eye view of the top of the vehicle, wide enough to see everything around it, so you would not only see the fallen mailbox, but the elderly man in your blind spot who had to dive out of the way. Fortunately, he will probably be warned by various beeps coming from inside the car.
There will come a day when we will climb into our cars, set our destination, then sit back and relax while the vehicle drives itself down the street. This innovative car certainly seems like a transitional step toward that end. Bob drove us to the beach where we watched the majestic waves roll in and dug our toes in the sand. Some of that sand clung to my feet, and wound up getting shaken off on the floormat of the backseat of Bob’s new car. I didn’t mention it to him.
But he’ll probably get an email.
(You can read more from Ken at kenlassblog.com)