Gary Brown: Modern cars show how much time we're wasting

Personal motorist statistic of the day – I have spent an hour so far this year sitting in traffic.

My new high-tech car told me that. Some monitoring system on it senses when my vehicle is stopped in traffic and I'm sitting with other cars at a stoplight, or when there is a lane closing, or if there is a car crash. Usually, it also notices when there is a line of stopped cars because everybody on God's asphalted Earth is going the same place I am and it senses when every single blessed time somebody tries to turn left when a bunch of cars are coming toward us.

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Then it stops the engine to save gas.

I don't have any idea how the monitoring thingy works, nor did I request it. The sensor already was installed on my vehicle when I bought it toward the end of last year. When I stop at certain times and brake as though I'm going to be sitting for a while, the engine shuts down and the display comes on and I get to watch the passing seconds and accumulating fuel savings.

Recently my stop time reached the first hour, and in that time I saved 0.446 of a gallon of gasoline. Going by the average price of gasoline in the United States today – $3.52 cents, as I Google it – I've saved $1.56992. I'm leaving the nines in there because they're high numbers and it makes me feel better than saving only "a buck-fifty and some change."

Figuring that I drive the car somewhere pretty much every day, it turns out that I've saved a little less than a penny every day.

So, obviously, paying extra for whatever option the gas-monitoring system cost when I bought the car isn't working out too well for me financially. The only reason to have the information show up on the dashboard every time I stop is it's more fun to watch the seconds tick away than it is to listen to political news on satellite radio.

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Helping the environment

The incentive for me and other up-to-date drivers might be helping the environment.

By continually shutting the engine down, I'm guessing I've kept myself from putting 0.446 of a gallon's worth of bad stuff into the atmosphere. I'm not sure if that's going to stop climate change, but it's a start.

All I need is a few hundred million other drivers throughout the world to watch their gas monitoring thingamabob and we've got this whole climate problem licked.

They may need to buy new cars, though. I know my old one didn't do a lick of good for the environment. Toward the end, before I got rid of it, my car had quite a few miles on it, so I probably was listed as one of the primary causes of global warming. Elected officials and witnesses all probably talked about me at congressional hearings.

If I'd shown up to listen, they might have pointed at me and said, "There he is!"

"Where did you park?"

I would have had to rush out to my car and speed away, spewing odors and gasses in my wake.

Now, I am almost a spokesman for fuel efficiency specifically and environmental protection in general – all because a car salesman said "I think you'll love the interior" when I walked toward my car for a test drive.

What a waste of time

But, beyond all that, what struck me when the monitoring doohickey finally reached an hour was exactly how much time I was wasting just sitting around in traffic, listening to music, news, sports talk shows, the broadcasts of games, comedy routines and whatever else shows up on satelite radio.

It's an hour already, and it'll be two hours by the end of the year.

I've been driving for about 5? decades now, so that's more than 100 hours of my life gone, wasted, thrown away on stuff I did while I was stuck in traffic. I don't even remotely remember most of that time. I hope it wasn't a high percentage of Top 40 music. I know I've listened to a lot of books on disc the last few years, so at least I've got a literary education to feel good about.

Most of the time I probably was just sitting there waiting, sort of in a daze, asking myself such questions as "What's wrong with this light? Why won't it change? Is it stuck?" or "Why are we stopped here, where there's no road work?"

Maybe I spent some time in reflection, solving such personal problems as determining whether it was better to go to the bank before the grocery store, or the other way around.

What I didn't do was cure a disease, save Social Security, write a novel, or improve the national system of education. You don't do those kinds of things while sitting in the driver's seat, tapping impatiently on the dashboard and saying "C'mon, c'mon..."

There's nothing that draws attention to wasting hours of your life quite like the mounting minutes of a car monitoring system shown right there in front of you. Now, when I sit at a stoplight, I feel like a failure, as I see seconds of my life tick away.

I've lost those moments forever – and now I know it – all because I believed a car salesman when he said, "You're going to love the huge digital display."

Reach Gary at [email protected]. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown decries all the time he's wasted in his modern car