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Reticularium

NETWORKS PLACE

... that drives you where it’s told to and is able to repair itself (at least restore itself back to the last known working state). It sounds cool, but it makes you a passenger rather than a driver.

... that has it’s hood melded shut, and if engine fails all you can do is replace your car. Sounds like a good idea, but think about this:

  1. each time you replace the car, you lose all your customizations.
  2. what if it’s impossible to replace for some reason (e.g. you are on a wilderness trip)?
  3. would you really enjoy to own such a car? wouldn’t you feel like an idiot not allowed even to look under the car hood?
  4. you would pay for even a simple maintenance and repair that you could do yourself otherwise; if you couldn’t, there would be other owners’ communities to help you; there would be such communities for hood-melded-shut cars as well, but they would discuss only which repair shop is better instead of how to do it.
  5. you would pay more to fix more complex issues because only a service company having a special access license granted by manufacturer could help you, or they would merely charge you more because they would know that you couldn’t do it yourself even if you wanted to.

... that has hidden compartments that you have no access to. In theory, only manufacturer has. But in practice, criminals get access easily, and each such car is being used by criminals. There are companies that offer various products aimed to protect such cars from criminals, but criminals are always a step ahead. And such cars owners have to pay extra money for those products. But those products make things even worse: they make such cars owners believe that their cars are now safe, which is far from real.

... that is so extremely fool-proof, that each time you want to e.g. turn right, the car first asks you if you really meant to do this. Perhaps you wanted to turn left but confused left and right? Only after you confirm your decision, it allows to actually turn right.

... that doesn’t allow you to just do things like open doors, fasten seat belts and the like. You have to do everything via a good-looking central console named GUI that is not an addition like in other cars, but the only controlling device for everything. This solution looks friendly, but it has two main disadvantages: 1) if this GUI doesn’t have a control for some operation, this operation can’t be done at all (though sometimes you can buy 3rd party product that adds needed control to the console), and 2) if GUI fails, you can’t even unfasten your seat belts. If you are not fastened, you can re-initialize the controlling device; to do this you have to stop the engine, exit the car and then enter again and start the engine. If you are fastened, there is a special button named “Hard Reset” that throws you out of the car and then restarts everything.

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