I'm scared for the future of cars. My dad got a brand new car and there are so many features that make me angry. And some of them come from a good place (safety), like when the steering wheel viabrating when he veers into a lane without indicating, but it makes me so mad that there are so many nanny-state features being put into cars. Instead of enforcing tighter regulations on making sure we are safe drivers, the car manufacturers are trying to make it harder to make mistakes, thus taking it upon themselves to police our behaviours as drivers. I don't want to be lulled into a false sense of security because I can rely on my car to make sure I won't crash etc, and so maybe more people might get behind the wheel when maybe they need to reconsider whether it's safe for them to drive, because "it's okay, the car will wake me up if I start drifting". I don't like that my dad's new car sends his driving data to an app, and probably the manufacturer and maybe even the dealership will have access to the data. Once we are lulled into the new normal of our driving data being stored/shared that way, mechanics might start requiring us to provide access to this data prior to a service, and can plan how much they will charge for a service because of our driving behaviour because of some obscure conditions we signed in small print when the car was bought or some shit like that. And what I hate the most (apart from the data collection and potential privacy breach) is the fact that my dad couldn't buy a brand new manual car. I hope one day we will be a ble to drive around electric cars with a manual operation, to be able to change gears clunkily with a clutch or something nostalgic like that. I'm going to miss dad's old car which I didn't get to say goodbye to; older than me, which taught me to drive manual, and was a constant presence in my life until this week.
