CHARGING AHEAD
To the benignly uninformed, the blatantly uninterested and especially the belligerently unimpressed, advanced new technologies can be confronting, confusing and ponderously difficult to decipher. A mental minefield, easier undermined than understood.
Quite often, and particularly in the early stages of development, there can be so much that just doesn’t compute in the cerebral cavern of most minds – this one included – when something appears a very long way outside the square of ‘normal’.
Much depends, I guess, on how advanced, complex or different the new technology is and the product or component it affects. At its most extreme, radical technology can appear to the average layman as a world of unnecessary intrusion, a dark art, inhabited by tedious technocrats, staid scientists, fairy tale futurists, commercial carpetbaggers and at the end of the chain, manipulative marketeers.
Still, there’s no shortage of examples where seemingly complex technology has also been hugely successful. Like, the arrival of electronic engine controls in the ’80s and specifically, Detroit Diesel’s original Series 60 engine, delivering the world’s first completely new heavy-duty diesel engine developed from the outset with full authority electronic engine controls.
Those old enough to recall those days will also recall that this was radical stuff indeed, and with typical predictability, frustrations and derision were rampant as the technology went through its inevitable growing pains on the way to maturity. Yet, despite its early issues and snarling complaints, the electronically controlled Series 60 quite literally changed the world of diesel engine design and efficiency, to the point where it is today unimaginable that any powertrain is not completely controlled by the microprocessors of an electronic control module.
Similarly, the evolution of automated mechanical transmissions wasn’t without its early detractors. Again though, the technology has gradually developed to the stage where highly advanced and incredibly intuitive automated shifters are simply accepted as the norm while manual transmissions – and the drivers capable of using them with any proficiency – are on a greasy pole to history’s scrapheap.
The point of all this is that the formative days of any new technology, and especially radical new technology which completely upends accepted practice, will initially, and almost certainly, beckon resentment and ridicule rather than respect or regard for its potential to improve and impress.
