Things that surprise you re: todays motoring.

[2011G6E]

Just having a chat with an old friend tonight, who I hadn't seen since the early nineties. Lives went seperate ways, he moved away for work, that sort of thing. We'd been mates in high school from '78 to 1980 when we both left in grade 10 (as most people did back then to work), and had both been car mad. The subject turned to modern motoring and the things that still surprise you, given the way things used to be. He drives an SS Commodore ute, but his last car was, I think he said, a Typhoon F6 (?).
When we were at school and driving around in the early eighties, everyone used to, of course, wonder about the future of motoring...what would cars be like in twenty years time? The line from the excellent Australian movie "Running On Empty" sprung to mind, where the main character is being a bit philosophical to his girlfriend about why they like hotted up cars so much. He said that in the future cars like that would be gone, and we'd probably all be running around in electric wheelchairs or something.

So I was wondering: what things surprise you about motoring today...things you thought would be common now, but which haven't happened...yet?
Here's my list:

* Speed limiters. They've been talked about for many many years, even back when I started driving in 1982, but then they were called "governors". With all the electronics in new cars, I'm honestly surprised they aren't a standard part of the system.
* Banning cars from the road once they are five/ten years old...this has been brought up every five years or so since the late eighties, usually by one of the big auto makers, the last time I believe by Mazda, purely for safety reasons of course...not to boost sales...no, that's not the reason at all...
* Horsepower. Honestly, back in the 80's, we all thought that post-2000 motoring would be boring as batshite and not be able to pull the skin off a rice pudding, with everyone restricted to little gutless but extremely efficient econoboxes or electric cars as fuel was supposed to be running out, or gone, by then. I even have a popular motoring book by Peter Wherrit written in the late seventies which has a final chapter on the future of motoring, and how "oil will be virtually all gone by the late nineties or just after 2000"...and that we'd all better get used to driving something very different, or possibly the age of the private car would be long gone by then and public transport would be the commonest way to get around. If you told an 18 year old me in 1983 that in 2011 I'd be driving a large rear wheel drive Australian sedan with a 270hp four liter six cylinder engine and six speed automatic box, I'd have laughed a you. More so if you said it would return high thirties in the miles per gallon on the highway driven even reasonably carefully. My '82 Celica, a two liter five speed manual, honestly uses more fuel on the highway than our G6E...
* Policing: Speed cameras. We never saw that one coming. Still, I can vaguely remember in the early seventies my old man complaining about the cop sitting at the table with a huge amphometer on it just outside Childers when we used to drive up to grandmas place in Bundaberg, so even handheld radar seemed novel and futuristic when it came out.
* Electric cars. They're more trouble than they're worth, even now. There used to be the odd oddball pop up in magazines with old cars that they'd rigged up with a dozen or so car batteries and a big electric motor, and how they could only go 100km on a charge, and even now they're still a puzzle. Batteries and storing electricity is, and always has been, a Very Big Problem...it's best to create it on demand, which is why coal fired power stations are still the best way to generate power (beside nuclear)...you can't efficiently store a lot of electricity for later on. We honestly thought however that some breakthrough would have been made by 2000 that made electric cars cheap and at least as convenient as petrol cars.

Who's got anything else?