Driving on today’s highways can be an aggravating (and dangerous) experience, and it doesn’t help that you can only communicate with the other drivers around you by honking your horn – not exactly a medium conducive to feelings of brotherly love.
So one day, while wishing I could yell at the driver of the truck in front of me to please move a bit to the right so I might overtake it safely, it occurred to me that we badly need a means of car-to-car communication. One idea I had was to install a loudspeaker on every car like police cars have – so we could say “the yellow truck, please move to the right!”, or “Green Toyota, your back wheel is wobbling, better check it before it falls off!” or simply “Thanks!” when someone had slowed down to let us merge.
It then occurred to me that this could lead to a real cacophony on the road, so I had a better idea – why not simply add a LED marquee at the back of the car that would allow the driver to broadcast short messages to the car behind – say, “Sorry about that!” or “Keep a safe distance!” or even “You idiot, who taught you to drive?”…
This would be easy to do at the factory, but when I checked it out today I discovered that it exists as a retrofit: the charmingly named web company iwoot.com (the name stands for I Want One Of Those) sells a “LED Car Sign” that fits in the rear window and has an ingeniously simple controller allowing the driver to change the short messages displayed.
Great minds think alike… 🙂
May 5, 2009 — 5:07 pm
What *I* want is some sort of wireless megaphone that punches right into the car so the driver can hear me. “Use your turn signal, you blasted numbskull!” is far more effective than a smiley face.