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Are our vehicles machines with people in them, or are they people with mechanical extensions?
When I’m driving a car, it’s pretty clear: I, the driver, am in command of a powerful machine that is a mechanical extension of myself.
Older cars mainly provide extensions of my action capabilities. I can move faster and hit things harder than I could without the car. There are limited sensory extensions as well, such as mirrors to allow me to see behind myself without turning my head around, and headlights that extend my ability to see at night. Newer cars provide more elaborate sensory and action extensions, such as cruise-control, proximity detection, automatic braking, lane following, automatic parking, and in some cases almost self-driving capability.
But when I’m a pedestrian, or a driver interacting with other cars, a car is a machine with, probably, one person or more inside it. It’s the behavioral properties of the other vehicle that are most relevant to me.
Most fundamentally to a pedestrian or driver of another vehicle, a car, truck or tank is a large, heavy object capable of fast movement that can be dangerous to the pedestrian or other driver. When the distance between the vehicle and oneself is decreasing rapidly, it poses a danger of collision that should be avoided. If the…
