Yesterday I was browsing through news channels and one news caught my attention. It was a news of Volkwagen Sedan cruzing through the streets of Germany. It was a normal car with one speciality - auto driver. It was driven by a machine or in a more sophisticated manner, it was driven by a computer. The reporter elaborated this news by emphasizing the fact that the computer, with the assistance of cameras and GPS is able to drive the car swiftly through busy streets. This is really cool!
Memories of one of favorite TV serial 'Knight riders' were refreshed immediately. This is one of my favorite TV serial and since my childhood I had always wanted to own one such car. Infact as a kid I even imagined myself taking the car to school and doing all the cool stuff, read it stunts, impressing girls, that Micheal Knight did. For those who had not seen this serial, Michael's car, aka Kid, is so intelligent that it not only drives the car but take care of the driver as well.
But wait a minute, This is a story of 1981 and we have achieved it after 30 odd years! This is a very large duration considering the advancements done in other streams of technologies.
There was an era when innovations in auto and aviation industry were very rapid. Take for example innovation in automobile industry in three intervals viz 1900, 1950 and 1980. Cars manufactured in 1900 were very crude and were merely a substitute to a chariot without the need of horse to pull it. But soon they were equipped with not only better engine but with facilities like radio, heater and safety features like seat belts followed by air bags.
The American car manufacturers infact started a crazy race of manufacturing cars with powerful engines. These muscle cars were powered with engines with capacity exceeding 5 liters. This is even more powerful than today's standard. Sadly, this race was infact killed by the fuel crises, whcih led to new race of manufacturing fuel efficient cars.But the relative progress in manufacturing fuel efficiency cars is very less as compared to the progress that was done while manufacturing powerful cars.
Now consider the aviation industry. Browse the airplane models that were manufactured during second world war ie 1940s and 1960. The planes in 1940s were having propeller on its nose and lacked basic safety standard (forget about luxury standards) as per today's norms. Since the propeller was mounted on nose, they required a longer runway for take off and landing as compared to their counterparts having jet enginees or the one having propellor on their wings. A new technology of propulsion was introduced in 1960 called the Jet engines. These engines were more efficient than thier older counterparts. Passenger Planes in 1960s were powerd with jet engines. This technology is used even today.
But its was 1975 when the atlantic aerospace was shattered by the roar of mighty plane capable to outperforming the speed of sound. Even though this feat was achieved by some air force planes, ' Concorde' was the first and only passenger plane capable of doing this miracle. Speed was compromised by space available in plane, passenger cabin was cramped but passengers were able to fly from London to New York in remarkably reduced time. Apart from speed the other remarkable thing that this plane had was a flexible nose. Aerodynamics required a long tapering nose which proved an hindrance in pilots vision blocking the view of runway while landing and taking off. So, engineers made the nose flexible, which moved down while landing / take-off and moved up to cope up with the aerodynamic requirements, thus reducing the air resistance at high speed.Think again, Year when this happened was 1975, when personal computers, mobile phone were still a part of some science fiction. Pocket calculator was then the only gadget which only people with thick pockets could afford.
The other plane worth mentioning in this discussion is Antenov 225. It is one of the lagest plane ever manufactured. To imagine the size of the plane just consider its weight. It weighed more than 600 tons. Still not able to imagine anything, its weight was equal to 130 adult elephants!. It was manufactured in early 1980 when personal computers were still not a reality. So huge was this plane and so huge was its capacity to carry goods that the smallest plane could fly through the carriage space of antonov 225. It has not only carried cargos but have also carried space shuttles to their destination. Remember the year in which this plane came into existence :1980.
Suddenly, all the innovative brains stopped working on innovations in mechanical engineering and focused on innovating computer software and hardware; mobile phone as well. Achievments in this field of electronics and software are indeed remarkable and have helped us achieve things that seemed impossible almost yesterday. Consider the size factor, innovation in display technology helped in moving from CRT monitors to LCD/LED monitor. This reduced the size of monitor substancially. LCD monitors are a sliced up version of CRT montors that are available since 2005. But today, innovators have managed to fabricate the monitor with mother board and hard disk (entire CPU) within it, thus substancially reducing the size of a personal computer without compromising on the performance factor. Not only size but price of a PC have also exponentially reduced over a period of time.
The new face of computers are the parmtop devices like smartphones and tablet PCs. They have seemless power which can be compared with their bigger counterparts. You can do all your work using them. These devices have evolved so rapidly that navigation technology - GPS which seemed to be an apple pie of James bond flick is now a reality for normal mobile users. Almost all phones are now equipped with GPS.
But I wonder, why the hell GPS is not shipped with all the cars? why is it still the feature of high end cars?
Though GPS may seem like a novelty, car manufactures still dont bother to replace the old analog speed-o-meter with a digital one. Is it very difficult to implement? offcourse not! Cars donot have the limiting criteria of space, even a bulky device can be comfortable adjusted in the dashboard of a car. We do not need to re-engineer existing devices to fit in cars. They can be comfortably accommodated. Infact cars perfomance can be monitored in-detail and hence can be improved. The only car that I have seen that has a digital display as a standard accessary is Jaguar x6. which costs a fortune. As against this, you buy any phone color display with camera is a standard accessory and may cost you somewhere around 4 thousand. Agreed that the quality of camera to be used in car is way too different but this doesn’t seem to me as an impossible gadget to shipped as a standard accessory. Some may argue that camera being fragile and prone to failure may risk passenger’s life. But so are side mirrors. They too are fragile and prone to damage in populated streets. Worst being they divert drivers view by a huge angle when he want to view traffic behind him. Imagine that this is replaced with camera and display is mounted at a comfortable viewing angle. This will ease driver’s life a lot.
Air crash investigations were improved to a great extent by the introdution of black box. Imagine if we induce a similar technology not to investigate accidents primarily, but for investigating the performance of cars. Imagine if a device like this is fixed in all cars and a run time graphical display is available to the driver. This will definately help drivers to drive car and maintain cars efficiently, thus helping all conserve fuel consumption.
Imagine a day when the power of computing and networking are combined in a car, cars will not only become userfreindly but sensible as well. Cars may communicate with each other and inform about the traffic conditions ahead advicing other cars to take an optimal route. Possibilities are seemless and scope is huge. Roads will become a safer place and we will be able to march ahead in the race to make our earth green.
