Mechanic’s Tale: Brave New Worlds

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This really isn’t a Mechanic’s Tale. This is more of a biblical prophecy telling of a future, both great and terrible, but one that can no more be stopped than a wall of flowing lava or a tidal wave.

Remember where personal computers were in the early Nineties? People played games on them and stored recipes on them, but by and large they were the domain of a special group of people who could fight their way through DOS and do really amazing time-saving and productive things. But the capacity for what PCs became and are still becoming was all in place. It just took the Windows operating system to make them accessible to the masses, and accessible to people who could endlessly improve them and find new things for them to do.

That is where automotive electronics are right now. The only thing the automotive PCM (powertrain control module; i.e., the computer that runs everything) needs now is two-way communications; in essence its own cellphone or wireless modem, and the revolution will take off.

Central control

I’d like to use GM as my model because they’ve done a better job with centralizing all the electricals and electronics on the car through the PCM than anyone else. Unfortunately, instead of leapfrogging the competition by light years, their goal will be to extort a subscription fee and hook-up fee and tie you to a live operator, which is a little like using Deep Blue (the IBM supercomputer) to gather data, and then sending the reply using smoke signals.

Have you heard the OnStar commercial with the woman who has locked herself out of her car at the daycare center with her child in the car? She’s holding a cell phone. She calls OnStar and they unlock the doors for her. Duh! The car has two-way communication. She’s holding a phone. Punch in your code, call the car, which in essence has its own phone number, and do it yourself! Oops, GM doesn’t get $895 if you do that.

There may be a certain sector of people who can and will pay a thousand dollars to have someone hold their hands and unlock their door, but when another manufacturer starts offering my vision, standard OnStar will fall like the billion-dollar Iridium Anywhere phones, whose satellites gave astronomers everywhere spectacular views as they burned up in the atmosphere. 

Two-way street

Once two-way communication is standard in the car’s computer, and either by emissions law or safety law it will be soon, the revolution can start. The computer data connectors are already standard and the method of data transmission is standard. When you buy your car you’d receive a disk, and with a laptop computer you could program in as many or as few features as you want, all accessible through your mobile phone (or the phone you just borrowed if yours is locked in the car).

I have a remote starter in my van that allows my wife to warm up or cool down the van from the living room before stepping outside. People pay upwards of $250 for this add-on when all the things needed to do it are already in the car. Unlock the doors, blow the horn, and turn the lights on at night before you step outside. Deter theft, defrost the windows, take out the trash? Darn, it won’t do that, but anything electrical you can think of, it can do.

And for the children, some nice features too. Say you’ve got a daughter who’s paying too much attention to the “D”-Average Clod in her biology class. And every night she takes the car to her friend Stephanie’s house to study. A quick check of your PC shows the map grid where she is and it’s not Stephanie’s. Or Junior takes after the old man and has a bit of a lead foot. Well, just program the fuel and timing curve to give him the performance of a ‘78 diesel Rabbit — no turbo please. I’m sure he will thank you for the good mileage he’s getting.

I know some of you out there are crying privacy rights, but the Supreme Court ruled years ago that you have a lesser expectancy of privacy in your car, and teenagers in their parents’ car have even a lesser expectancy than that. Hopefully, when my son is old enough to drive, there will also be an internal and external camera to keep an eye on him.

Scary parts

Now the scary part. Obviously, with all this technology, turning the car off remotely is the easiest of things to do. Good theft protection, right? Heck, we could even blow up the airbag in the thief’s face to teach him a lesson. We won’t do that.

But here is roughly what will happen. Every year in every state it happens once or twice that a high-speed police pursuit goes terribly wrong, and a minivan with mother and children gets broadsided, ending in terrible injuries or death. The authorities and the media will cry out that, if only the police had the ability to turn the engine off remotely, or even just dramatically cut the power down (this would work better because the driver would still have the power steering and power brakes but a top speed of about five mph), these tragedies could be avoided.

When it is discovered how cheaply this technology can be put in, either a major state, say California, or the federal government, will demand it: after all, terrorists drive cars. Oh, and people who don’t make their car payments, well, their cars won’t start (a company in California already offers this as an add-on to high-risk financing), and the repo man will have no problem finding them.

You may have guessed that I’m not thrilled with this power being given to the authorities, but it will happen. If true form is followed, the law will bear the name of someone killed in a pursuit crash. As for casual speeding, your car will continuously be transmitting packets of information, including your speed, and some states will have receivers posted on the highway (look for Connecticut to start this), and simply mail you an irrefutable ticket, as your own car has just ratted you out.

Or in areas where they really don’t want you to speed (as opposed to just wanting to give you a ticket), the speed limit sign will broadcast the posted speed and your car’s PCM will limit you to five miles over that. It will indeed be a brave new world, with all the advances, like every car (and not just a Lexus) calling 911 when the airbag deploys, but you will never be in your car alone.

And as a person who loves the anonymity and the absolute solitude of a long car trip, I’m going to miss it.

Doug Flint owns and operates Tune-Up Technology, a garage in Alexandria, Va.