More Nagging Vehicles: The Smart Intersections
Let’s see here, we’ve got the Eco-pedal that will tell us exactly how fast we are allowed to drive by pushing up on our accelerator pedal. We’ve got the Insurance premium gadget that will monitor our driving like a tattle-tell to our insurance company and rate our premium by how good of a driver we seem by our acceleration and braking rates.
We’ve got vehicles that will monitor our health while we drive to see if we are fit enough to be on the road… and now we have a new mother-in-law alert (Ford Smart Intersection) that will whine at us at every intersection if we come at it too fast. Most of us have one of those that comes every year at around Christmas time. Do we really need one 24/7.
Well, research shows that we perhaps do, approximately 40 percent of all vehicular accidents occur at an intersection when we are not paying attention. It appears as if we are often too distracted by all our gadgets… such as MP3 players, phones, GPS, DVD, Eco-pedals, health monitors, etc…
If they keep putting this stuff in our vehicles… pretty soon we are going to need a co-pilot just to take care of all those little things, while the other person can actually concentrate on driving. It is interesting to think that much of this problem is caused by the increasing amount of car gadgets… and yet they think they can make everything better, just by adding another car gadget on top of the rest.
But we’ll get off our soap box and get down to the facts. The Smart Intersection will work by warning the driver with a flashing red light and alert or voice command (“Hey dummy… stop!”) if they are approaching an impending danger at an intersection, such as another driver.
Using GPS technology, which is already quite abundant right now, the computer system will monitor where all the vehicles are, when the lights are going to change, etc., and decide the appropriate action for the driver and let them know if it senses they are deviating from the plan. Ford is busy working on this idea… so we could start to see more of this come to fruition in the coming models!
Technology, love it or hate it… is what is driving the world and giving us lots of stuff to report on every day!
But more importantly, you should remember the black 1982 Pontiac Trans-Am named K.I.T.T. with the cool T-tops and sweeping red lights running across the sleek front end bumper, letting everybody know that this wasn’t no ordinary Pontiac.

