This morning I weighed 216.4 pounds.
I rented a Ford Taurus on vacation, and
it came with a 500+ page manual. There is no excuse for this gigantic
tome. Ford has published a one-size-fits-all manual, covering every
possible variation of options. The single most common phrase in the
manual is “if equipped”. The car owner has to wade through dozens
of irrelevant pages to decide how to control the car that he or she happens
to own. (I’m blaming Ford here, but I believe most other car
manufacturers commit the same manual-publishing sin.)
I think the worst case of these “if
equipped” sections concerns the three possible key options. All
sorts of matters differ depending on whether you got an old-fashioned
car key, a key that can open the doors remotely, or a key that never
goes into an ignition (and the car senses its proximity).
This is the 21st century! I’ll tell
you how the big car companies should print their manuals: On Demand. The dealer should make the car’s computer communicate
with the printing computer. (The car’s main computer must know what
options the car has.) Then the printing computer will print a manual
with the owner’s name on it, containing only the text relevant to
the options in the owner’s car.
It’s so simple. How long do we have
to wait for car manuals like that?
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