More on the Flintstone Mobile – Could "Stone Age Driving" in Modern Times Help Solve the Problem of North Carolina Car Accidents?
Unless you lived your whole life under a rock, you no doubt are familiar with that vivid image of Fred Flintstone peddling his stone-aged car with his feet in the opening credits of the old school Flintstones cartoon. What can Fred’s approach to “driving” teach us about how to tackle the problem of North Carolina car accidents?
Here are three crucial lessons.
1. Slow is the new fast.
In a recent post on North Carolina car accidents and caveman driving, we touched on the idea that human beings did not evolve to travel at speeds that even the average Peugeot can travel – much less at the top speeds of sports cars like Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. On a fundamental level, we need to slow down the driving experience. Does this necessarily mean we need to reduce our velocities on the road? Not necessarily. Which brings us to the second point…
2. “Slowing down” has more to do with our perceptions of road events than the actual events themselves.
This is a tricky point to grasp. The absolute speed a vehicle goes is probably less relevant than the perceived speed of the vehicle, the perceived acceleration, the perceived torque, etc. We already drive cars, planes, boats, and other vehicles, far in excess of speeds that we “evolved” to “handle.” And our safety record is actually pretty amazing, given how unnatural it is to use these modes of transportation. So we’ve already created a kind of virtual slowing down of systems that allow us to slow down our perceptions of movement. We build our roads wide; we maintain large “space pockets” between vehicles, and we engineer sensitive equipment to help us compensate for our unnatural speed, acceleration, torque, etc.
3. The process of getting close to a Flintstone-like driving ideal must be continually refined.
Vigilance is key. We must pay attention to problems that drivers have, punish bad driving, hold wrongdoers accountable (a North Carolina car accident law firm can help), and refresh, refine, and renew our policies, engineering approaches, and even attitudes toward driving if we hope to make serious progress and make “driving” as safe as it used to be in Fred’s golden age.
More Web Resources:
Fred Flintstone driving
Flintstone credits
