Smarter than the rest?

YESTERDAY I saw my first new Defender, coming towards me on a local road. I waved, but the driver didn’t wave back. He looked distracted: perhaps he was looking for the Automatic Waveback Robot switch. After all, the car does everything else for you.

This century, as computing power has taken over more aspects of our daily lives, scientists have argued that the human race is getting stupider, because our under-worked brains are starting to atrophy. Let me quote Professor Charles Widger, author of Re-engineering Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2018) who says: “I believe we may be making ourselves dumber when we outsource thinking and rely on supposedly smart tech to micromanage our daily lives for the sake of cheap convenience.”

I agree with Prof Charlie. For evidence, allow me to present a reader’s letter that recently appeared in another motoring magazine: “My car is fitted with automatic windscreen wipers, but they sometimes don’t come on when it rains and I have to activate them myself,” he moaned. “My local independent mechanic says he can’t fix them. Do you have any ideas?”

The magazine suggested he should take his car to a specialist dealer, but I have a better suggestion: switch them on manually, like a grown-up.

I recently spoke to an otherwise intelligent woman who admitted that she had driven from her home in Cambridgeshire to a business appointment in “that place where Boris’s mate went to get his eyes tested” by relying entirely upon her sat-nav.

“That place” was Barnard Castle in County Durham, but she neither knew which county it was in, nor where she’d travelled through along the way, apart from remembering that she’d spent “a long time on the A1”.

I use a sat-nav myself, but I always take paper maps along, too – more out of habit than anything else, but I know they’ll come in useful the day the sat-nav packs up. GPS has probably saved a lot of lives by keeping drivers’ eyes on the road instead of a map on the passenger seat, but at what cost? Dementia is already on the increase in the western world, albeit mainly because people are living longer due to medical advances, but if doing more thinking and less computing helps keep our brains healthy, I’m all for it. I saw my own lovely mother suffer dementia in her final years and it was heartbreaking.

So are all these gadgets on the latest Land Rovers affecting our mental health? Well, I’ve often heard it said that today’s Gerry-built creations attract fools with more money than sense . . .

Driving a car requires a great deal of concentration, because if you lose concentration you will have an accident. Does that mean that autonomous, self-driving vehicles would be a good idea? Of course not! It will be a long time before any computer exists that could safely navigate a vehicle as safely and effectively as the human brain. There are simply too many variables. And I’d argue that driving a car is the best way to give your brain a workout, notwithstanding all those daft gadgets.

Returning to the business of waving to fellow Land Rover owners, I have to admit it is a dying art. Until the 1990s, just about every Land Rover and Range Rover owner would wave, but that’s because in those days most vehicles bearing the green oval badge were owned by enthusiasts. It’s been on the decline ever since.

Personally, I reckon the decline in waving picked up pace from 1997, when the original Freelander was launched. I remember that year being a passenger in one of the very first Freelanders on a long road trip from Devon to Peterborough. Former Land Rover journalist Carl Rodgerson was at the wheel and waved enthusiastically at every Land Rover we encountered en route. But nobody waved back – probably because it was the first Freelander they’d ever seen and it didn’t look like any other Solihull product.

These days, of course, there’s nothing coming from Solihull, Halewood or Slovakia that resembles anything Land Rovers used to look like. Apart from cheery waves still exchanged between Series, old Defender and Classic Range Rover owners, it’s a custom that has more or less died out, which is a great shame. To experience the camaraderie of old, these days you have to join a club or attend one of the Land Rover shows (once lockdown has ended).

Funnily enough, it is the owners of no-frills, basic Land Rovers that still tend to wave. Is that because we’re cleverer than the rest? I like to think so.

“Are all these gadgets on the latest Land Rovers affecting our mental health? Well, I’ve heard it said that today’s Gerry-built creations attract fools with more money than sense…”