Jul 03 2008
New Technology A Must For All Leadfoots
In this day and age, our automobiles are starting to be equipped with some handy little bells and whistles. I have been scouting the new car market for the past few months now, and it amazes me what factory options are now available. And they aren’t all luxury-only models that you can add them to. I have seen cars that can tell you when you are in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot, synch up with your audio player, and even email you a maintenance log every week. And I used to think the pop-out overhead maplight was cool when I was a kid. Or power windows. Well, while these new additions are highly useful for anyone who gets into a car, I couldn’t help but notice a nice option entering the European market that has its eyes on the US of A in the near future.
Vauxhall Motors has implemented a little gadget called the Speed Limit Detector. It is a little camera that takes up to thirty shots per second of the road ahead of you. Each snapshot captures all nearby road signs, which are then analyzed with image recognition software. The end result is amazing. It feeds the speed limit into a display on your dashboard, which pops up conveniently next to your speedometer allowing you to really see how fast you are going. Now, I don’t know how many times I have been traveling down good ol’ county route in-the-middle-of-nowhere, with no idea of what the speed limit is. And I would look for roadsigns if I didn’t have to worry about avoiding loose cattle or avoiding a ditch. I don’t really want to be pulled over in some backwoods town by some hillbilly sheriff if I can avoid it.
Driving around while armed with this little mechanism will give me the comfort I have been looking for. I am sure I will still speed whenever possible, because I just prefer getting places four minutes faster, but at least I will never have to wonder what the posted limits are. I suppose I could also use it to stay just under the amount over the limit to avoid getting more than 5 points on my license. I am sure this was not the manufacturer’s intentions, though.
