In their relentless pursuit of safety, automakers are adding more and more features to their cars in an effort to make them safer to drive and crash. Examples include things like automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist, side curtain airbags, rear view cameras, and even front view cameras. Cameras that display – on your dashboard – what is in front of your car. Like, you know, in case you can’t see out your windshield, there’s a camera for that.

In their relentless pursuit of safety– or at least their pursuit of adding a bunch of technology that supposedly takes the hard part of driving, actually controlling your car and having to think in emergency situations out of driving – automakers might have actually made cars more dangerous. Not to mention more expensive.

By adding more features and technology, they’ve also added much more distraction. Apparently, modern drivers are too inconvenienced to manually select the appropriate gear for their transmission, yet can still look at a computer screen and operate three different buttons and switches to change the radio channel. I really don’t get it.

You can shift your transmission without having to look at it. I challenge anyone to change their radio channel, adjust the sound balance, and set their navigation system to always point their car relative to North on a digital map – without looking away from the road. It just can’t be done by a regular human being. Maybe by an engineer, but even that’s a bit of a stretch. I know engineers who can’t operate all their features that their car computer gives them.

Compare a modern car to anything made before 1980. Cars had no antilock brakes, rear cameras, automatic parking, lane keeping assist, or automatic stopping, and in order to be a good driver you actually had to be good at driving.

Also, do people seriously have no objections to lane keeping assist or automatic braking? No objections to the car not being in your control in emergency situations? People already complain that their cars will pull them back into their lane when they swing out to the other side of the road to pass a cyclist and leave them space. What happens when you want to drive outside of your lane? And will these features activate when you drive offroad, through water, or through leaves or snow?  

How many consumers are going to object to more safety? Not many. More convenience? Very, very few. It would be difficult to find a consumer – who actually wants to buy a new car – who doesn’t care about the special features offered.

The problem is when “safety” features make a car less safe. For example, front wheel drive cars are engineered to understeer when cornering too fast. In other words, if you take a turn too fast you can only turn the wheel so far. The car goes where it wants, and all you can do is brake. In a rear wheel drive car, which oversteers, you can swing the drive wheels out and regain control. Sure, you might damage your tires if you do it consistently, but don’t you want to be able to keep the car from slamming into a wall?

This example of front wheel drive shows that consumers are willing to sacrifice safety for features they want, like better fuel economy, more space, and easier driving in bad conditions. Yet automakers keep advertising that cars are safer and safer.

No, cars are not safer. If you get into a major accident, the chance of death decreases. But is that really safety? Wouldn’t avoiding the accident in the first place really be safety? Especially because the government requires that airbags be designed to protect unbelted occupants — meaning that people who follow the law and wear their seatbelts get the reward of a too-large explosion throwing a bag of air too fast into them, often causing serious injury. Is that safety?

Furthermore, who is using all these features in their new cars? When a button or switch has sixty or seventy different functions, who can be expected to memorize them? Considering new cars have a little dashboard light to remind people what side of the car they have to refuel from, what do automakers expect people to remember?

Also, is it just me, or is having a huge computer screen in the middle of your dashboard really ugly? You have fancy materials and great design, but then a large flat slab of pixels that every other automaker also features. And it’s not actually positioned to point towards the driver, like the dashboard of a truck tractor. It’s also kind of stupid looking, especially in economy cars, where you can tell that the computer was an afterthought.

Now, the federal government requires all new cars to be sold with a rear view camera that activates when the car is placed into reverse, because having three mirrors really wasn’t enough. Now you can see a fish-eyed, blurry video of what is behind your car, but not stuff to the sides of your car in the blind spots, where you actually can’t see.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against safety. I think it’s a good idea that a totally inexperienced driver can stop a car just as quickly as a professional driver. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on technology to drive the car safely so that the driver can focus on their car’s computer. That’s kinda the point of the driver, to drive the car.

What people don’t realise is that the addition of features that replace driving skill with carelessness is a bad idea, for one simple reason. People can drive cars with less and less skill, which increases the chance that they will get in a preventable accident. Remember that your car is not a metal cage functioning as the exception to the rules of physics. Technology won’t save you. Skills will.