Laws that prevent drivers from watching movies and stuff while driving is obviously a good thing but I don't think there is anything against mounting tablets. I have been eyeing this iPad mini car mount for a few weeks in hopes of setting up a cool obd display and to use Waze. I see phones and tablets suctioned to windshields all of the time for GPS reasons.

 

40 miles a day on beans and hay.

 

An automotive engineer once told me...

"You can try to idiot-proof the car but you never idiot-proof the idiot!"

 

Hell yeah...

Got Ben Hur edition and God on my side... can NEVAAH lose.

 

I think our versions may be more like this:

 

"I'm not a complete idiot - some parts are missing."
A Nonny Mouse

 

LOL. I don't suggest we go back that far. However, it wouldn't be too difficult for todays manufacturers to build in a feature or two that would prevent the idiots driving on our roads from causing accidents while driving and playing with their electronic toys. Perhaps the car has to be in park or the emergency brake has to be set before someone can play with many electronic features that aren't pertinent to driving the car. That would be easy to do and I can guarantee would save some lives.

 

The problem with that is the car doesn't know if the driver or passenger is playing with the nav, connected, etc. Maybe disable some things while driving if no passenger is detected by the weight sensor in the seat?

I know some of the tach settings are disabled while driving, like looking at maintenance info and changing door lock options, blinker options, etc. In that case they know that the driver is going to be making those changes so it's disabled while in motion. You can still change the auto wiper sensitivity though.

 

It is interesting to me reading this discussion. How far Mini has moved from it's original form. The Mini I learned to drive was not available in an automatic and there was no synchromesh on 1st gear which meant you had to "double d clutch" to change from 2nd to 1st. Now the Mini parks itself!
Then again in that small car it really felt like you had the engine right there...because it was! The engine was so simple you could work on it yourself - although you were probably unknowingly dying of lead poisoning. Now days these cars are so complicated that the best we can do is buy bolt-on parts for them to satisfy our desire to be mechanic of our own vehicle.
It really feels to me that we are in the last few years of even being able to buy cars like we dream these are. Soon it will be electric or compressed air with some sort of governor that only allows travelling at the speed limit.
My children think that a engine is some peripheral that attached to the onboard computer they really have no interest in getting their hands dirty. I think Signcaver is right. Electronics is what will sell cars in the future...in fact that is what will be driving them (not us)!
It won't be log before you won't be able to buy a standard transmission....enjoy this experience while you can.

 

Ha Ha very true.. cars in general are changing fast with more electronics.. Lets just hope that MINI has done a better job with the quality of the electronics. IMO there electronics have been very poor at best. They have cool electrical gadgets but they don't last at all..lol

 

Many of you probably saw the thread title and dismissed the idea, but look at this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...nc-system.html