New and Old
February 10, 2009 (Tuesday)
Daimler-Chrysler has built an experimental research Mercedes vehicle that has a joystick in the place of a steering wheel. Click here to see it. Having never used a joystick, I am totally unqualified to drive it, but I’m sure my children and especially my grandchildren know how to do it. Video games have given them more than enough experience to drive it easily.
So in a way we have come full circle in automobile design, since the first automobiles really were “horseless carriages,” steered by an upright stick.
It took automobile makers a while to make the transition from horse-drawn carriages to the modern automobiles of today. At first they earned the name, “horseless carriage,” by being just that: a carriage that looked very much like the ones that had been pulled by real horses.
I recall as a child we liked to climb on the cars, but we had to be very careful about getting on the roof of the car, because it was made of canvass, just like the vehicles they had replaced.
Domestic auto production ceased during World War 2, and there were no new cars in 1943, 1944, and 1945. Many of the first cars of 1946 had wooden bumpers, which were later replaced by the dealer with steel bumpers as the steel became available again.
Cars are better today than they used to be. My 1994 Mercury still runs like new and rides much more comfortably than many new cars today. I remember cars that could not have possibly lasted as long as my car. And, folks, it’s an American car (assembled in Canada). I guess I’ll get a replacement car pretty soon, but my only reason will be that a fifteen-year-old car has to show its age pretty soon and start wearing out. (I have a second car. It’s a 1991 model. I guess I like old cars).