| name | value |
| date | 2025-02-08 |
| location | Tijuana, MX |
| author | Anton |
December 2020. I’ve juts got my first driving license and went to Mexico for a solo trip.
I’ve rented a car all by myself. I’ve put my luggage in the car and left rental station.
I’ve parked the car near the coffee shop and wanted to go to the beach. I closed the car and the trunk using electric key.
I’ve checked the trunk of my car while before leaving to the coffee shop and realized it was open.
I’ve panicked a bit. Because there is no way I leave all my things in the car with an open trunk.
I’ve got into the car and went back to the rental. I told the guy that I cannot close my trunk.
He was surprised but came with me. I showed him that every time I close trunk via electric key and then try to open it with my hands - it would open.
I saw a smile on his face. He told me to close the trunk and give him the key - which I did. He went 10 meters aways from the car and told me to open the trunk.
I couldn’t! So the trunk was closed but would be automatically unlock if you come close with it with a key!
I mean this technology is amazing, but it’s absolutely shouldn’t be used!
There are two reasons:
- it’s not a beginner friendly. If you didn’t know they put this technology in the cars(which I didn’t because remember I just got my license) - you wouldn’t guess that was the reason trunk was always open. That technology was so unintuitive that you wouldn’t even google it!
- even if you know that technology works it’s really hard to trust it because it’s very difficult to verify that it works. If you are driving on your own the only way to verify that the trunk was locked is to lock it, walk away for 10 meters, put your keys on the ground and return and check the trunk.
Reflections
We live in the world where technology fails all the time - software, electricity, hardware and so on. We cannot just trust the technology, we should have an easy way to verify it worked.
Also using cool technology just for the technology sake is not needed. Eg we had physical keys and locks and they worked nicely for many years(decades, centuries?). They were easily learned since the young age and everyone could verify if the lock worked or was broken.