Why We Drive Pt 2: Feel and Direct Connection

We drive not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

(This is a continuation of musings on Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive. Read Part 1 here.)

Cars have gotten a lot more high-tech in the past century. Is that all good? Does that help us to be free? Crawford sees some problems:

Such minders [as anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control] can save you in a panic situation, but they also have a slight deskilling effect. They prevent a driver from learning the behavior of his car at the limits of traction, and how the car's chassis dynamics can be made to work for him or against him in the timing and modulation of steering and brake inputs.

When we don't exercise our muscles, they atrophy. If we let ABS and ESC take care of knowing our car's limits - we cease to upkeep our understanding of the limits. Sure, the engineer might know intellectually the calculations - but he has no feel. And the expert driver who gets into a car with ABS and ESC - feels that there is something wrong. Crawford talks about his experience driving an Audi RS3:

It took my shift commands as a general statement of mood, a request to be given due consideration when the committee next convenes. The car never spoke rudely to me of being wrong, as when I nearly rolled my 1963 Beetle. It was more like "Your opinion is important to us".

The virtue of feel - perhaps there is a better more technically precise word - is one that modern technology seeks to wipe out. At times this is inadvertent. At times it is misunderstood. If you have driven a car - especially a racecar - without power steering, you'll understand.

There is no simulated feedback that could replace what you feel through the steering wheel. Skilled users of tools are doing something fundamentally different than someone pushing a button on a machine.

An expert hockey player's attention isn't directed to his stick, it is directed through his stick to the puck, just as a piano player's attention is directed not to his fingers, nor even to the instrument's keys, but to the notes he is playing. A real "driver's car" is one that accomplishes a similar disappearing act, becoming a transparent two-way conduit of information and intention. But there is a tension between this ideal and the trend to introduce ever more layers of electronic mediation between driver and road.

This distinction is important - the good tool (if we are interested in developing the virtue of feel) is not necessarily more efficacious: it is just more transparent! It provides more direct access to feedback and more opportunities for input. The good tool has fewer layers - not more!

When we add more layers, we have to start adding feedback - artificial feedback.

Often what [ABS, throttle/brake by wire, etc.] amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver, and filter between intention and execution. What's more, an overzealous damping out of mechanical "transients" has made it necessary for the car to keep us informed by other means, rather than by the seat of the pants.

When there is a filter between intention and execution, the driver may not be aware of their harsh or extreme inputs. They might shake a steering wheel or mash the throttle in such a way that on a more bare bones car would cause both feedback (harsh accelerations) but potentially even damage. The driver is unaware of this, though, and is deprived of the chance to refine their feel.

The growing size of automobiles also is a form of this filter, removing us from the effects of poor decision-making.

From my own unscientific observation, I have been struck by the inadequate following distances often maintained by a driver in a typical six-thousand-pound SUV. As though the possibility of bodily harm were a pure abstraction.

All of these innovations are to make cars safer, but aren't we fighting 'distracted driving'? If this is so, perhaps there is a different way toward safety:

Going forward, the design principle that could help us mitigate distracted driving, and recover the joy of driving, would be one that exploits the sensori-motor capacities we have developed through human evolution.

This is a great shift in direction from what the West, especially America, has been moving towards. I like to call this "couch culture": a shift away from the active and towards the consumptive.

In the affluent West, many of our energies of innovation seem to be channeled into creating experiences for the consumer that will make him feel good without making demands on him.

But this is not why we drive.

The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us. Only then do we feel the progress of our own mastery.