Saturday, March 13, 2010
On The Passing Of Buttons And Switches
We love cars with row-upon-row of gleaming toggle switches and buttons. They're anachronistic and possibly a bit elitist, but they enhance the feeling of a direct connection between you and your machine. Sadly, they're going the way of the dodo.
There's something delightfully simple about the toggle switch, something eminently satisfying about the press of a button. Distilled down, the switch is nothing more than a circuit breaker, a device for controlling a small part of your car, but it's dying. It's being replaced by touch-activated display screens, capacitive touch panels, passive monitoring systems, proximity sensors, and automatic bottom-coddling devices. In many cars, you no longer have to decide it's dark enough to turn your lights on or wet enough to run your wipers. There's something to be said for the audible, tactile pop you get when you push a chromed door release button. It directly, inescapably connects you to the process.
One reason modern cars lack the character of their forebears is they seek to remove the effort from the act of driving. We cannot be alone in noticing a correlation between the effort it takes to drive a car and the love people have for it. Witness crank-start antiques where the driver does the spark advancement, adjusts the hand throttle, checks the oiling mechanisms, hits the grease zerks every couple days, and re-varnishes the wooden floors once a year. It takes work to make those machines move, and it requires a level of understanding between man and machine which long ago evaporated. Predictably, almost a century on, people still find that stuff fascinating.
