Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Why did they have to uninvent the governor?

No! Not the kind in the photo, the kind that kept your car from going too fast. I couldn’t find a picture of the car kind and you wouldn’t be able to make sense of it if I did. Here’s the story. You used to be able to buy an after-market governor for your motor vehicle. You set the maximum speed and simply drove normally with your right foot on the accelerator pedal except it would not let you exceed the set speed. “Isn’t that the same thing as a cruise control?” you might say. No. When you set a cruise control you can take your foot off the accelerator and keep going the same speed until you go to sleep or you have to tap it off because someone in front of you momentarily slows down or you reach a tight curve (usually in less than about 20 seconds). Sooner or later you forget to reset the cruise control. The next thing you know your speed creeps up, then whoop whoop, blue lights are flashing. Advantages of the governor are: If you go to sleep (not recommended) your right foot usually relaxes and you slow down and crash with less momentum. You don’t have to keep tripping it off every time you need to slow down briefly. You’re probably saying, “Yeah but what if I need to go a little faster to complete a pass?” No problem; they could just have a little solenoid in the accelerator linkage that would operate to push back on the accelerator if you exceeded the set speed. You’d be able to push hard to push through the resistance but you wouldn’t inadvertently push through it with normal comfortable cruising accelerator pedal pressure.