It's Not Distracted Driving If You're Leveraging Synergies

I'd claim that this is dumb shit no one wants, but I can see the managerial market for it: BMW is partnering with Microsoft to allow the cameras in BMWs to function as cameras in Microsoft Teams. At my workplace, we have one person who sometimes does Teams calls from his car - we don't like it, and we tell him not to, but he does it anyway. I suspect this is the target market: people who are convinced that their proof of presence in a meeting is more important than keeping their eyes on the road.

Distracted driving has become a real problem. Paying attention to your surroundings has always been critical when driving, and there have always been the potential for distractions: food and drink, talking with other passengers, tuning and singing to the radio. But it skyrocketed once we got cell phones, then smart phones. I remember driving on the highway with my sister-in-law, how she would keep glancing down at her phone. It was terrifying. I don't have to worry about this anymore - we haven't talked for almost a decade - but that's one person, and now I've got to worry about people not paying attention as they give their daily standup updates as well?

This sucks, and not just for the potential for distracted driving. There's also the creeping encroachment of work: the pandemic and widespread work-from-home gave us the potential of a future for work that was more relaxed, more flexible, and still allowed people to get things done. But that future's been entirely forgotten the last few years, as return-to-office mandates have become the norm, layoffs have devastated a number of industries, and AI becomes the shitty background noise of our devastatingly ordinary lives.

So many car ads are about experiences. You've seen them, the couple driving to the lake with a dog in the back, the handsome and well-groomed young guy with a pretty girl passenger side. Yet so much of the modern car experience is ugly and dull. Heated seats? Subscription fee. Microsoft Teams? Included for free. My 2020 Tiguan is boring as hell in the most complimentary way I can imagine, not breaking down, letting me go where I want, and feels like it might be the last vehicle I ever own that isn't stuffed with things I don't want.

All I ever want out of a vehicle is to let me drive for hours. When I was a teenager, I didn't have the money to go visit my online friends who lived hours away by plane, so I'd just borrow my parents' '97 Civic, go out around 9 or 10, and drive. Seeing no one, going nowhere, but that was entirely the point. Out of the city, down the highway and then the grid roads, taking note of where I turned because this was the era before electronic maps, and getting lost really meant getting lost. I'd let my mind go, watching things around me, not that there was much in the quiet prairie landscape, making promises to myself, little plans for my life that I'd never keep. Nothing around me but wheat fields looking spectral in the night, nothing to distract me but my hope for what came next. I don't want a car that ties me to the present. I've only ever wanted a car that lets me drift into the possibilities of the future.