Advertising speed
Grandad April 27th, 2007
The government has produced a new ad for television.
It is a very good ad about the dangers of speeding. It is extremely well done. It is an expensive ad. The special effects are so realistic and horrifying, they can only show it after 9pm.
It is a waste of money.
On the news last night, they showed a group of school kids who were being given a demonstration of cars trying to do an emergency stop at 80 kmph. On kids reaction was that “he thought they’d be driving faster than that”. He was disappointed. He wasn’t there to see the dangers of speeding. He was there to see fast cars. Tosser.
There are essentially two types on the road who speed.
There are the boy racers who think they are playing some kind of Playstation game. They love speed. They love overtaking. They love showing off ["Jayzus, Lads. I gorrup to 190 on de Arklow Bypass today. It was great"]. They are at their worst when they have passengers to whom they can show off. Ads aren’t going to affect them as they are pretty much brain dead anyway.
The other type is the company executive in his fancy company BMW. He is much too important to slow down. He is on his way to a board meeting and has a right to drive as fast as he likes because he is so important. The ad won’t work on him because he sees the ad as being for the plebs.
There is a solution to the mayhem on our roads.
It would cut down on speeding. It would drastically reduce congestion. It would cut road deaths to a fraction of their current levels. It would drastically reduce the cost of insurance even, because there would be much fewer accidents and car crime. But it would be controversial and expensive.
Suppose all vehicles were converted so that a pass-card was required for them to function? To get a pass-card, all would-be drivers would have to pass stringent tests, much along the lines of qualifying as a pilot.
To qualify as a pilot, you have to do something like 60 hours flying time with an instructor. You have to pass several exams. It is expensive.
I’m not saying that driver qualification should be quite so stringent, but the principle should be the same. To qualify, you would have to prove that you can drive in all circumstances - city traffic, rain, open road, motorway, snow, ice, fog, whatever. That can be done on a simulator. The simulator can even throw emergency situations at you to test your reaction.
I would say that a huge majority of our drivers would fail.
And if you get your licence with its embedded chip, and are convicted of a traffic offence, the chip can be deprogrammed. Back to square one!
If you combined the chip system with bio-recognition door locks, the whole thing would be virtually fool-froof.
We seem to think we have a divine right to drive a car. We don’t.
Only safe drivers should have that right.
Subscribe to audio
