Some blame the decline in American driving skills to the decline in manual transmissions.
Not long ago, within my lifetime, it wasn't hard to find a "stick shift" car at the dealer lot. Even the old "three-on-a-tree" transmission was sold (or at least offered) well into the 1970s. My '73 Pontiac had it, and my '79 Chevy van did as well. Funny thing, but if you read old car brochures from the 1930's and 1940's, the "column shift" was touted as a great advance in technology - no more gear shift lever "sprouting from the floor" and blocking passenger room. You could now sit three across!
Of course, if you ever had a three-speed column shifted manual, you know how long the gear throws were and how your center passenger would get knocked in the knee every time you shifted into first or third. But I digress.
Automatic transmissions took over in the 1950's, accounting for 80% of new car sales. And that was in the infancy of the technology, where Buick was still offering its lumbering Dynaflow and Pontiac the ill-fated "slim-jim" "rotomatic" drive. But by the late 1960's, the THM350 and THM400 proved that automatics could be reliable, and indeed, even bulletproof, although not responsive enough for enthusiast drivers.
People started driving cars like they were golf carts - with a "Go" pedal and a "Stop" pedal, often with one foot on each pedal, like a bicycle, often riding the brake ("driving like a salesman" my Dad used to call it). People stopped using the parking brake entirely (erroneously referring to it as the "emergency brake") and relied instead on a tiny parking pawl in their automatic transmission to hold the car in place.
Sad, too, as a recent incident illustrates the folly of this practice. A man left his truck running with a three-year old inside. Somehow, he wormed out of the child safety seat and bumped the shift lever into gear (must have been an old truck, most today require one foot on the brake to shift). The truck started rolling and ran over a toddler, killing him. If the parking brake was set, I doubt this would have happened. People put too much faith in that flimsy parking pawl, and so many cars historically and even today, have a history of popping out of "Park" and running over their owners (why do you think it is the law today that you have to put your foot on the brake to shift?).
Just use your parking brake - every time you park. Yea, I know, if you live in salt country, the cables rust solid and then lock the rear brakes in place. But that is all the more reason to use the parking brake every time you park! If the cables are exercised, they are far less likely to seize. If you never use them, it is pretty much guaranteed they will. Your choice, but someday you may need that brake! Using it all the time also points out whether it needs adjustment or not, which is better to keep up with than later find out when you try to use it and nothing happens. But enough of my soapbox for today - use your parking brake when parking!
But incidents like this illustrate the topic I want to discuss - how people learn to do things by rote, and fail to understand how things actually work or how their actions affect things. If you ever took apart an automatic transmission - or even looked at the diagram of one - you'd appreciate the folly of using the parking pawl to hold a 4,000lb vehicle on a hill. No doubt, you've felt the "thunk" of your transmission when you try to put it in gear, after parking on a steep hill. That's the parking pawl, giving up a tiny piece of metal. And metal in your transmission isn't good.
People who live in San Francisco know this - you will get yelled at if you don't park your car with the wheels turned toward the curb. Runaway cars are a real issue, and no one wants to be run over by a driverless car careening down that city's steep hills - or have their own car smashed by a car parked by an idiot who doesn't understand how gravity works.
In the dawn of the auto age, you had to really understand how a car worked to own one or drive one. Most cars came with tool kits and multiple spare tires, as blowouts and breakdowns were common. Steering wheels had levers for throttle and spark advance - there was no centrifugal or vacuum advance mechanisms (much less engine management computers). As you accelerated, you had to adjust the spark advance of the engine - you really had to know how a car worked!
And shifting? No synchromesh - just straight-cut gears that you could easily grind together if you didn't double-clutch, first. But then again, many of those cars had such low compression, huge displacements, and monstrous torque that you merely picked a gear and drove off - shifting while driving wasn't even a thing.
Starting the car was a real chore - and could break your arm if you weren't careful and the car backfired. With the advent of the electric starter, automatic spark advance, and the syncromesh transmission, driving became a lot easier - not mindless, mind you, but such that the great unwashed masses could fake it pretty well.
Today, we are told we are on the cusp of the self-driving car, and apparently some folks think this has already happened, as they take their eyes off the road to read a Tweet while driving, drifting into the oncoming lane at the same time. This is a common occurrence, and even "professional" truck drivers are doing it - we see it all the time. After years of declining fatality rates on the road, they are rising again, at alarming rates. People are convinced their driver assists and airbags will save them. They aren't.
A whole generation or two (or three) has learned to drive cars by rote learning. Put in the key, start the engine, push the "Go" pedal to go, the "Stop" pedal to stop. That's it. That's basically all they know. Their car may have a tachometer, but they have no idea why (and with automatic transmissions and rev limiters, it is a good question as to why). All those other controls - for the lights, wipers, turn signals - are not used very often if at all. We see people in grey cars, in a blinding rainstorm, driving over the speed limit with their lights off, tailgating, and changing lanes without signaling. What could possibly go wrong? They even passed laws mandating "lights on when raining" but it is hard to enforce as Police know that if they pull over that unlit grey sedan in a rainstorm, they are likely to cause an accident instead of preventing one as drivers slam on their brakes when they see the flashing lights.
But my rant goes beyond cars - that is just an obvious example. Today, people are less tech-savvy than ever before, in a society that is more reliant on technology to survive than ever before. Most people have no idea how their computer works - not even a rough idea - let alone their smart phone. We have become a cargo cult and are perversely proud of it. And I am no exception to this trend. One reason I cling to older technology is that I understand how it works - and it wasn't designed to keep its inner workings a dark secret. It seems a lot of modern tech falls along the lines of "you don't need to know that!" and "open your wallet!"
And this is by design. The more ignorant your user base is, the more money you make from them. So why make technology easier to understand, when it is more profitable to obfuscate it?
When I was working at Carrier, helping design a circuit board for a heat pump control, I was told we had to encapsulate the board with a cover, which added a lot of cost to the design. I had spent weeks trimming pennies from the component cost, only to have this cover - costing dollars - foisted upon me. The service department demanded this for psychological reasons. They found that "old school" service techs, when they saw a printed circuit board, would immediately swap it out, as their experience with electronic controls, from the 1950's, schooled them to believe that anything electronic was unreliable.
After sending back these boards, we would test them and find they worked fine. Turns out, the repair was something simple, like a clogged condensate line. When the circuit board lit up the "condensate drain overflow" light, they just assumed the sensor or board was bad. The thought was (and apparently experience proved this) that a "black box" control unit was trusted more, as it was a mystery as to what was inside it. The techs were then more likely to diagnose the actual problem rather than using superstition to try to solve them.
It is funny, but there was a lot of prejudice back then (and even today) against electronic controls. I worked on another project, for centrifugal chillers, using a microprocessor controller (the Intel 8032). An old-timers told me, "that will never work! We tried that back in the 1950's and the durn tubes kept burning out!"
Tubes. That was the mentality.
Perhaps it is inevitable that as technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes harder and harder to understand by the general population. Techno-ignorance becomes the norm, not the exception. But there is a huge risk involved with this trend, particularly as AI and Social Media (just about the same thing, now) take over the Internet. Few people, it seems, are able to tell fake from real, and indeed, it is getting harder and harder to tell.
Just about anything you read online these days has some AI content. "News" articles follow a format where the title tells the story, a photo caption repeats the title, and the first paragraph repeats the title again. This forces the reader to scroll down as the ads load, pushing the text further and further away. This is all by design, and much of the text is uninformative or just AI-generated crap.
No wonder we see more and more people retreating to conspiracy theories and primitive thinking. The world seems complex and scary, so we will retreat to our survival bunker on our flat earth and wait out the inevitable civil war. What these folks fail to realize is that we depend on technology to survive and that means we depend on each other to survive. We can't go it alone and we can't go back to a "simpler time" when frontiersmen carved a cabin out of timber and hunted deer to survive to the ripe old age of 40 or so, before dying of consumption or whatever.
People fail to realize that these cues being prompted on social media are being created by forces who want to exploit them, either for financial gain, political gain, or as part of an international game of power-chess. We should all be on guard to wonder whether our opinions or feelings are truly our own, or are, in fact, just rage-bait reactions to stories planted in the press. Some are so obvious, of course, others are more subtle. And the more obvious ones become less obvious, once you fall down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy thinking or extremist politics.
Meanwhile, our educational system is dumbed down more and more - relying on rote learning more than actual understanding. Math is now merely memorizing the answers. Driver's Ed was ditched because "statistics" don't show any significant difference in accident rates between those who took it and those who didn't. In an era of tight budgets, all that matters is being able to pass the standardized test. This isn't helping people develop critical thinking skills.
I wish there was an easy answer to all of this, but as I noted before, easy answers to complex problems are usually the wrong answers. I may take years or even decades, before people start to engage their skepticism and critical thinking skills.
If ever!
