Steal This Idea: #1 - Smarter Cars (and everything else)

You know all those crazy ideas you have? The ones that are really cool and maybe even revolutionary, but you would never be able to do anything with them. Maybe they're for an industry outside your own or an industry or company that doesn't really solicit or care to hear new ideas. We'll normally I'd just file them away in a lonely corner space of my idea file but now I have a place to let them free. So go ahead, take these ideas and make them happen, I dare you.

My car has one of those sensors on it that automatically turn on the lights if it senses "darkness," maybe yours does too. Trouble is, often this "darkness" isn't really darkness, it's just me sitting at a red light under an overpass. Or my car being parked in the carport. But hey, what are you gonna do, it's just a stupid little sensor, right?

Here's what I'm thinking: my car has enough information to make a better decision, it just doesn't currently use it. There's a clock in my car, probably yours too. My car's clock currently doesn't know its am from pm, but I'm sure a small and inexpensive upgraded part could. Now, armed with the ability to know what time of day it is my car could make a much more informed decision about turning my lights off or on. Perhaps between the hours of 9am and 5pm my car could require five minutes of darkness before turning on the lights rather than the current 30 seconds or so. That would take care of most all the shade you would encounter and still allow the sensor to preform the safety function it was originally set out to do.

This also got me thinking, what else out there could be making smarter decisions if it was using all the information at its disposal?