Read books. Seriously, I’ve seen people driving down the road with a book open on the steering wheel. Of course, that was a few years ago, so now it’s probably “read blogs”.
We’re in a twilight area between low and high tech vehicles it seems. Cars now are adding more and more gadgets that don’t really have much to do with actual driving, but we’re not quite yet to the point where the car has enough tech to take over the driving so you can SAFELY fiddle with your Onstar or whathaveyou.
It’s a bad point right now…there are growing distractions in the car, but human drivers still have to drive them.
While I personally can’t stand the idea of self-driving (or at least self-correcting…think a robust version of ESC) cars, I like the idea of them being available so that all the non-enthusiast drivers (i.e. the cars=appliances crowd, the my-ipod-and-latte-are-more-important-than-manual-transmissions people, etc.) can leave the driving (or at least the emergencies) to something that’s not going to get distracted.
Though I wonder if in the super-high-tech world of our great-grandkids, there’s going to be problems with self-aware cars getting distracted themselves (reading the latest binary feeds from Mars or something) so you’ll have to get a robot to keep the car in line.