I see concept car after concept car, many with sporting pretenses, touting drive-by-wire steering as some sort of revolutionary and apparently inevitable advancement. Other than the claim that it improves packaging, which I find dubious to say the least, does anybody know how this could do anything but **** up the driving experience?
Sure, modern video game force-feedback steering wheels show us that the concept can work with a degree of success, but what's the point?
If the steering sensor clocks out early because you've picked up a field mouse with a penchant for electrical insulation sleeve after parking in the grass outside your favorite deserted rave-party warehouse, or for the several hundred other reasons electronic gizmos tend to pack it in, you're ****ed like Chuck, aren't you?; doomed to die right there in your stupid techno-fetish car when you spear off the road and straight into a decidedly low-tech oak tree?
The bizarre thing is that all these concept cars seem to make use of carbon fiber and weigh less than a Fiat X 1/9 or the like. I've driven an X 1/9, which has a steering wheel positively dripping with succulent unassisted steering feel and about which I can say with some authority that even a little girl in pigtails and magenta-colored longstockings would have no problem whirring about, even when the car is stopped.
If the future of cars is small displacement, efficient engines and lightweight chassis, why give a steering mechanism that's a miniaturized copy of a bloody supertanker's?
To this Quail, it reeks of the same sort of 'just because we can' gooseshit thinking that brought us the motorized tie rack and battery-powered wine bottle de-corker.
(Think I'm making the mechanized wine opener up? Sorry, sunshine: Oster® Appliances - Products — (party on, indeed)).
Just to prove that I'm no technophobe, I've recently fitted a laser sight to my trusty home defense chainsaw.
Discuss.