INTERLUDE (1) - DRIVING IN AMERICA

Driving in America is an absolute doddle once you get used to the fact that the half of the car that you usually expect to find to the left of you is actually to the right of you, that all left hand turns are BIG, and that all right hand turns are small.

There’s also the slightly bewildering road markings that imply – but don’t necessarily mean - that you might have to stop in the towns, those “All-way” stop junctions, the occasional “Right Turn on Red” rule, the “Every Lane is an Overtaking Lane” philosophy of the Freeways, and the odd notion that the road named on the sign in front of you is referring to the one half a block away that runs at ninety degrees to the one that you’re driving upon.

Once you get a handle on that, it really is a breeze, and I maintain that a three-hundred mile drive in the USA is far easier than one of a similar distance in the UK.

And I’ll bet our signage and road markings are just as bewildering to anyone who has not grown up with them, too…

We’ve always been given “Compacts” to drive by the Rental Companies. Well, there are only two of us, and sometimes their definition of what a “Compact” car is doesn’t bear much comparison to my own, because they have always seemed vast until I get used to them.

This time, however, I grabbed the Ford Fiesta eagerly, simply because they were familiar and I’d driven them at home, although the space in the boot did turn out to be a little tight for all of our baggage.

Some of the biggest developments in the engineering of cars which help to simplify and almost automate driving seem to have all come about because of the American’s relationship with the automobile and, to be honest, when you’re driving along those long desert highways, or negotiating the twisting bends of the coast road, or are just trying to work your way through one of the Gordian knots that is the average city road junction, you can well understand why.

For example, my knees and shoulders will be eternally grateful for the invention of Automatic Transmission, without which the endless gear changes, accelerations and braking would be an utter, utter nightmare.

You could argue that this removes you from being in touch with the “feel” of the car, and it certainly makes maintaining a constant speed a little more difficult, especially in an era when car manufacturers seem to have decided that it’s okay to block your view of the speedometer with the steering wheel.

Of course, perhaps the biggest contribution is Cruise Control which means that you can set a speed and the car will do its level best to maintain it unless to touch the brake or the accelerator in which case control reverts to you, which is pretty useful on the Highways and Freeways, I can assure you.

One of the hire cars I’ve had in America did not have this facility and I really did miss it. This time it only took me two days to remember that it was there, and suddenly life seemed to get a heck of a lot simpler, once I’d remembered how the “On”, “Set” and “Resume” buttons actually functioned.

New to me this time was the Sat-Nav, or GPS System as they prefer to put it, and it was an utter revelation. No longer was there much uncertainty that we had chosen the correct route, no longer did we have to try to interpret maps and a bewildering number of road-signage to try and navigate our way around the place, and no longer did the frankly bewildering cities seem quite as frightening.

To be honest, paying the extra for the GPS System really was the very best use of our Dollars that we got out of this trip. Many of the usual worries that trouble me had simply vanished, and, happily, the sudden vagueness about “Left” and “Right” which always seems to grip me the minute I get to America was less pronounced this time, simply because of the indicator arrows that appeared upon Min’s screen.

Of course, there are downsides. Suddenly you became very dependent upon “Min” knowing where it was going, and sometimes you still had to anticipate or interpret quite what it was getting at.  Also, there was a very strong sense of detachment that came over me when all three of these developments, the Automatic Transmission, the Cruise Control and the Sat-Nav were all in full flow, and it really did feel on occasions that I was just about the least important factor in the driving of the car, which was a very strange and peculiar feeling to have.

Interestingly, I was listening to “The Digital Human” on the radio as I drove home one evening after I got home, and they had a lot to say about putting moral decisions at the heart of engineering when it comes to the idea of cars being driven by computers. In a particular unfortunate situation, when a person stumbles into the car’s path in a one-lane tunnel, should the car maintain its route and hit the pedestrian, or swerve and perhaps kill its occupant…?

In the end, for the tricky stuff at least, it appears that you do need the human being behind the wheel to be in charge after all.