4 pieces of basic car tech you don’t notice until they’re gone

If you’re of a certain age, earning a certain level of income there’s every chance that you occasionally find yourself yearning for the motoring experiences of your youth. Those moments most likely come when you’re sitting in traffic on your our long commute into the office while the shouting yahoo radio stations insist on airing in the morning puts you in a foul mood (I’m only making an educated guess, of course. I haven’t been hiding in the back of your car or anything).

“It never used to be like this,” you might mutter to yourself. “Driving used to be a pleasure, all about the freedom of pressing down on the accelerator and pointing your steering wheel in the right direction”.

At this point, you’ll look at all the high-tech gizmos in your family saloon (the ones you aren’t really sure how to use), and a dangerous thought will creep into your mind. You see, it’s at this point that you’ll contemplate buying and fixing up an old banger, perhaps the same model as your first car. Ignore this idea, it’s incredibly stupid.

But why should you heed the advice of a young whippersnapper like me? After all, what do I know about the stresses of corporate life. Well, while it is true that I work for a pretty awesome company and that our dress code is relaxed enough that anyone wearing a tie is assumed to be going to an interview with a competitor, I do think you should listen to my perspective.

You see, while my job allows me to experience the best new tech car manufacturers have to offer, I’m also young and broke enough for my everyday wheels to be… well, let’s just say calling them basic would be charitable.

I’m therefore in a unique position to be able to tell you exactly what pieces of car tech you miss when they’re suddenly not there (hint: it’s not the in-dash touchscreen).

1. Power steering

If you haven’t driven a car without power steering in a while, this might come as something of a surprise. You might remember a time when no one had power steering and no one whined about how difficult it was to parallel park a car.

Well I’m sorry, but it’s awful. When I’m in my car and there’s heavy traffic, I don’t care how close to my intended destination that parallel parking is, I’ll drive around until I can find a parking I can drive into.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m incompetent at parallel parking, it’s just that by the time I’ve gone through the slow reverse-lock-opposite-lock-straighten process, at least three people will have come close to wearing out their hooters.

It’s not worth the stress.

2. Air-con

Image: Dave See via Flickr.

Remember those youthful memories we were talking about earlier? A number of them probably involved you and a bunch of mates cruising down a long, straight country road with your windows down and the music pumping. Surely you were more connected with the world when you didn’t have air-con, weren’t you?

Maybe, and I will admit that most days you can live without it (although getting sweaty on the way to a meeting isn’t fun for anyone), but it’s not actually its cooling properties that make it noticeable when it’s not there.

No, the moment you’ll really notice that you don’t have aircon is the first time your widnscreen starts fogging up. Pumping your heater works, but nowhere near as efficiently as it would in conjunction with air-con (the latter helps dry out the air in your car) and that extra time could prove vital if you’re travelling along a road you can’t stop on.

3. Central locking (in all the doors)

Image: James086 via Wikimedia Commons

One of the quirks of my car comes courtesy of its aftermarket central locking system. It’s meant to lock and unlock the two front doors, but every now and then it decides to only lock the passenger side door. That means every time there’s someone else in the car, you’re either forced to take a gamble or remember to check that it’s actually worked (something that’s surprisingly easy to forget to do).

The ubiquity of central locking in cars produced after mine (a pretty substantial period) also means that any time there are more than two people in my car, someone will forget to lock their door, even if they’ve seen me manually unlock it to let them in.

I really do have more exciting things to do than checking whether or not all my doors are locked.

4. USB audio port

This one’s simple: there’s only so much inane drivel one person can take on their morning commute to work. A built-in USB slot provides a simple, sage method of making that inanity stop. Yes I know there are aftermarket options. I should know, mine got stolen in an attempted hijacking, along with my wallet, phone, iPod and GPS but not, thank goodness, my car.

And that, when it comes down to it, is the point. I might miss all those pieces of basic tech when they’re not around but not nearly as much as I’d miss not having a car.

Image: Simon Schoeters via Flickr.