The first vehicle I owned was a Chevrolet pickup. It had a three-speed manual transmission. You know, three on the tree. It was a nice vehicle. I had it for a few years and the brakes started giving me trouble. Back then I was a lot smarter than I am now.
I could fix the brakes myself. One day, I jacked the truck up and removed a tire and started to work on the brakes. Of course, I was having a little trouble getting all the stuff pulled off and repaired and put back on.
Luckily, my friend, Bill, drove up and saved the day. He gave me some expertise and we had the brakes working again in no time.
He told me that he learned about the brake system of trucks and everything else after avoiding an accident in a grain truck. He was driving a big farm truck from his house into town. He was headed for a stop sign at a T intersection. He pressed the brakes and the pedal went all the way to the floor. He was stomping the floorboard and down shifting and the big truck with several thousand bushels of beans rolled through the intersection and into the woods.
The only damage was a broken headlight when he hit some bushes.
From that moment on, he became an expert in brake repair.
He could tell you all about brake pads, rotors, drums, calipers, disc pads, master cylinders, hydraulic lines and name several of the best brands of brake fluid. When we got through doing our repairs, the truck wouldn’t run any faster but it would stop.
I haven’t had to do much brake repair since then. Every car since then has had good brakes and doesn’t need much maintenance. You are probably thinking what is the point of this little story about brakes.
Recently, a new car had its computer hacked and the brakes could be controlled by someone other than the driver.
A computer hacker can take over the braking system in your car?! Here is the big question, who was the idiot that thought of this? We finally get braking systems that work and we want them computerized?
The only thing I can think of that needs brakes operated by an outside party would be the brakes on your kids bike. When you first get the kid to understand how to ride a bike and he or she takes off and goes faster than you can run, you would love to have remote control brakes.
That might be the dumbest thing ever. Even worse is the car costs one hundred thousand dollars and now the brakes can be
hijacked by a guy sitting in his apartment just trying to cause trouble.
There are some cars that have the steering controlled by electrical impulse and that is controlled by computer.
That computer is hooked to a Wi-Fi system and it too can be hijacked.
What is next?
Of course, what is next is the self-driving car.
It also is hooked to a computer that can be hacked and driven by some one else.
It is time we went back to a faulty braking system. If drivers had to worry about their brakes, they might be more careful drivers. If we had to repair our braking system every six months, we would pay more attention to our cars and we would also pay more attention to the drivers around us.
There could be the added benefit of more vigilant driving and people would put down their phones and actually look out the window. This slight inconvenience might make the ride safer and certainly more enjoyable.
