Subjecting us to a thumb tax

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DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour     

One of the better ideas in the auto industry has been the advent of what I refer to as “intelligent steering wheels.” Defined it means steering wheels with controls for the audio system, cruise control, vehicle information, etc. The concept is to put needed adjustments to the aforementioned goodies in the hands of the driver who doesn’t have to go on a treasure hunt to find them somewhere else in the vehicle cockpit while taking his or her eyes off the road.


It’s supposed to be a safety device and for the most part it is.

However, I often wonder just who does their ergonomic testing during the design and manufacturing process. Often my thoughts turn to one of several suspects: Captain Hook, the one-armed man from The Fugitive or even some poor bastard who had his thumb blown off in the war or lost it through some tragic mishap.

And just what would make me think such nefarious thoughts? It’s when I’m driving along, listening to some talk radio station tell me what to think and all of a sudden, in the middle of a turn, I unknowingly hit the “mode” button and the next thing I know I’m listening to Snoop Lion (Snoop Dog’s new preferred name) or Cee Lo Green or even Pastor Rufus Q. Johnson from the 37th Abyssinian Church of the New Age Prayer Soldiers.

Trust me when I tell you that I did not voluntarily make that switch; the positioning of the steering wheel control knob caused it.

Or another situation where I’m driving down the highway on cruise control, thinking that all’s right with my world when all of a sudden, in the process of switching radio stations, my vehicle has taken a leap forward to the tune of another 35 miles per hour or it has decreased the speed by the same amount and caused me to rely on the kindness of my seat belt to hold me upright instead of falling on the floor of the car from the sudden deceleration.  

So this tells me that some design engineer is not doing his or her job when it comes to the proper height and positioning of the offending control mechanism. I often wonder just how this is possible that such a flaw wasn’t noticed during the development process.

Several theories come to mind, however. The first is similar to the demise of Northwest Airlines #255 where the crew was interrupted during the preflight checklist and missed a key item that eventually caused the aircraft to crash, killing everyone on board except some toddler.

Maybe during the testing of the radio control on the left side of the steering wheel the engineer’s buddy came by and offered to buy lunch at the approaching Roach Coach. By the time he had eaten and tried to digest his ptomaine burger and returned to his work bench he probably forgot where he was in the cycle and eliminated the positioning step and went on to the next page.

Or perhaps the design was good but in the manufacturing process it was caught up in a labor dispute caused by an impending union contract negotiation. The workers may have clandestinely put an extra shim in the activator, causing the button to sit up just high enough where it would be brushed continuously by the unsuspecting, but getting more irked by the minute driver.

Sort of like the situation on American Airlines where there is a labor dispute and all of a sudden some of their aircraft have had entire rows of seats come loose from their runners and slide down the aisle while the aircraft are in flight.

Except the car company couldn’t blame something as seemingly absurd about years of spilled pop and coffee caused the weakening of the connectors. (Full discloser: for many years of my life I was a salesman and if I were good enough to make potential customers believe a whopper like that and still buy my product I would not be wasting your time writing these silly pieces; I’d be in Tahiti making a complete ass of myself.)

So on behalf of the majority of us who are all thumbs, which would explain why there’s so much angst at constantly activating changes accidentally, try being more careful in what you design and build.

To quote the philosophy of Richard Lazarus, who spent a lifetime training carpenters at the nation’s largest outhouse factory, “Be the labor great or small; do it right or not at all.”