AUTOMATIC DRIVING

NZ Truth, Issue 1143, 27 October 1927, Page 13

AUTOMATIC DRIVING

Safety First Trait In Motorists If two motorists who could see one another approached a crossroads, the first motorist being 220 yards off and doing 30 m.p.h., and the second motorist being 176 yards off and doing 22 m.p.h., what would happen if neither slowed down?

""THERE are not many of us who could 1 work out that little problem without pencil and paper, yet it is the sort of thing that motorists are deciding hundreds of times a day. In the case given above, the faster car would pass the cross-roads when the slower one was some .40 feet away. .Neither motorist m such a case would consider that he had barely escaped an accident, yet had the slower motorist been just two miles an hour faster those two cars would have met, fairly and squarely, m the middle of the cross-roads. A business man said recently that he referred any particularly knotty problem to his subconscious self before he went to sleep, and that the answer was always ready m the morning. Yet the motorist solves abstruse mathematical problems on the spur of the moment. Imagine an ordinary situation any day m New Zealand traffic. A motorist approaches a busy turning at 12 m.p.h. He is overhauling a cart doing

6 m.p.h. A taxi, travelling at 18 m.p.h. is overtaking him. A tramcar. is api proaching from the left. Two , old ladies, and a dog are crossing the road, and there are a dozen or so other vehicles m the immediate neighborhood. In the space of a single second the motorist at 12 m.p.h. covers 17 feet, the taxi goes 25 feet, even the old ladies progress 4 feet. It , would be beyond the power of even our local meteorologist to forecast all ths possible positions of these vehicles and people two seconds later — the number of variations runs into millions. The taxi may turn unexpectedly, the tramcar stop, one old lady stand still and the other one dodge, whilst the dog may dart across the road after a cat. Two seconds later another dozen assorted pedestrians and vehicles will be giving rise to further intricate problems, yet the motorist sails along unperturbed. The subconscious mind is m control, acting through the physical brain and eyes, nerves and muscles. Certainly the novice may get flurried, and accidents do happen, but still the inner consciousness of the average man pulls him through situations a hundred times a. day which are beyond the power of the physical brain even to reason out.