Whose safety is it anyway?

I’ve always wondered about ‘safety features’ added to cars. How come, they get added to upscale cars only? I mean the higher you go up the fancy-shmancy ladder, the more idiot-proof and protective become the car’s features. Let’s start from the simple rear window wiper. In the lower end, you don’t have this feature. You have to buy the slightly upper-market version (sorry I cant take names – this would be so much simpler if I said the brand name of the cars involved) for the wiper to be in place. So that means what? For my money, I am not allowed to have a better view of what is looming menacingly close to me at the back on a dark rainy day? Only if I cough up more, is this simple safety and clarity feature going to be given to me? And get this: I can’t even add on this feature later by perhaps selling one of my dogs and having more disposable income (as if anyone will want to buy). It’s not technically possible, I am told, to add on a rear wiper, because then there will be so much wiring, that we could be fried to crisps inside the car. Our rear window will be clear, but we won’t be alive to see it – so what’s the point.)

Next – the fancy pffuff air-bag that comes out of some cars upon impact. Why can’t I or Pappu from next door have it? In fact, given that the rich and the famous usually have stable drivers, or move around in their own jet anyway, why this nice bag for them? Shouldn’t a feature of this sort be for all us Indians who are running out buying cars without having obtained a licence, and continue to drive them with no benefit of training? We’re the ones more likely to have sudden impacts, no?

Then there’s a delicious feature I saw in a really fancy big car – the name of this car starts with a B and ends with a W and there are only 3 alphabets in the name. The feature is this: It gives you little pips and beeps and kind whispers to help you park. Yes, I kid you not. It has a built in mummy-daddy-nanny, this car. When you’re trying to park in a tight spot between two cars, it tells you you’re too close to the curb, or a little light flashes on your dashboard to say you’ve got a whole foot more and you can keep reversing, etc….you get the point. Now I ask you, isn’t this wasted on the rich, successful guy inside this car who became that way because he has a good spatial sense in the first place. As opposed to most of us who are just this side of dyslexic when it comes to parking our cars?

I was watching a television program that confirmed my theory that safety features in cars are meant only for the already safe and secure fat-cats. Swishy cars have a little chip that discerns whether you’re falling asleep at the wheel. How does it do this? Well, when you’re alert and driving, even on a long uninterrupted road (woh kya hota hai?), usually you’re making minor adjustments to the steering wheel to stay on course. When you get sleepy, you stop making these adjustments and drive in a more approximate way. The chip picks this up and beeps loudly so that you wake up. I’m sure there is someone in some lab taking this a step further, whereby the car then automatically brews you some coffee, caresses your tired face and shoulders, and gets you alert again.

Us mere mortals, meanwhile, can blunder along. The only safety feature we get is demented renditions of happy-birthday-to-you or here-comes-the-bride, while we’re reversing. And who pays attention to those, anyway.