Eight pieces of technology your parents/grandparents would never have believed would end up on a car
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Keyless Access
Had you mentioned to a car owner just fifteen years ago that nowadays you can both open and start your car without the unnecessary ballast of a key weighing you down, they’d have assumed you’d spent too long in the sun.
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Tri-zone climate control
Car journeys in temperatures above 20°C back in the day usually required all four windows to be opened (via a ratchet handle) and a climate control system which, at full blast, was as effective as an asthmatic door mouse blowing at you. But a system that varies temperatures from left to right, front and back?…
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Heated/cooled seats
…and which even includes a fan built into the leather seats that can heat up or cool your back pockets? Tomorrow’s world indeed.
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Touchscreen technology
Remember walkmans and tape decks? The boom box and Rick Astley? All out-dated and subsequently replaced with newer versions. The epitome of updated technology is touchscreen, whereby your fingers swipe and select rather than press. And with haptic systems like the Cadillac User Experience, the system even pokes back.
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Bluetooth
The elephant in the room. To fully understand this twenty years ago, you needed to get your head around the fact that every person on the planet would have a portable phone small enough to fit in their pocket that didn’t need wires, could access the internet(?), and from which you could play music. Now, try explaining Bluetooth in that context.
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Intelligent headlights
The arduous task of twisting a switch either up or down is long gone thanks to automatic headlights. If that’s not enough, Intellibeam lights will automatically dim when the system senses oncoming traffic. The days of temporarily blinded drivers ploughing into ditches in the dead of night are seemingly over.
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Satnav/rear view camera
The road atlas (complete with dog end corners) has been consigned to the loft, thanks to sat nav now being an option on almost every car on sale. Alongside a system telling you which way to go forward, throw in another screen showing you which way to go backgrounds, and thus avoid the muscle spasms that usually came with reverse parallel parking without power steering.
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Lane departure warning/forward collision alert/adaptive cruise control
Taking all of the above into account, the most impressive is yet to come. Thanks to driver assist technologies like cruise control, forward collision alert and lane departure warning, your daily run-around will accelerate, decelerate, brake hard and even turn the wheel for you if on-board systems sense an upcoming hazard. Rather impressively, in the last twenty years, technology has even managed to make ‘paying attention’ obsolete.
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We can only assume that, given the rate with which development is going, when our own children come to buy their 2025 Cadillac SRX, the driver might not be needed at all.
Now there’s a challenge for you General Motors.
