My mate Izzy thinks I should be saying that phrase often. He reckons my new car makes me look like the “Sales Rep” type. And to prove that I didn’t buy the car for its looks alone, I decided to try out some of the cooler ‘under the hood’ feature of the car yesterday.
It was a wet afternoon, quite a few parts of the country had heavy rain warnings and some smaller towns even suffered from flash floods. It wasn’t that bad in Auckland, the roads were wet and there was a constant drizzle, ideal conditions for testing out the traction control and the Vehicle Stability Assist (VSA) feature that Honda have been gloating about. I had seen the videos (like the one below) but I wanted to see for myself.
My verdict? You would imagine a car would skid if you attempt to make a 90 degree turn at 50 Km/h, even more so if the road is wet and it’s raining. The only thing I noticed was a the little “VSA” message appear and disappear on the dash. The car made a perfect turn with no skidding, no over steer. It was beautiful, I couldn’t help but think of all the electronics and software in the car making this possible. The sensors in the wheels, they gyro’s inside the car, the control system trying to measure all of this and the brilliant software algorithms that try to make the adjustments as transparent as possible. Yes a true Engineer knows what to appreciate.
But then I remembered the type of software Engineers that have started to come out of universities recently.
Somehow, I don’t think I’ll try that again.
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