There is a serious disconnect between engineers and production idea people. Production idea people want to innovate. They want a new thing every year. They do not want improvements, they want change – out of the box! Dynamic!

Some of these ideas are good but few are ground-breaking. What is interesting is how some modern ideas have, in this day and age, been thought out so poorly. A case in point is the tomato sauce bottle, which has the opening at the bottom (the upside-down ketchup bottle). With the opening at the bottom, the sauce comes out when you open the bottle. Too much sauce, in fact. Then, when you close the bottle, the sauce gets trapped by the lid, which then encrusts with each opening. (Is there such a word as encrusts? There should be.) The inventor of this bottle made $14-million out of it and the bottles contained Heinz tomato sauce. As much as I love Heinz, I do not like the bottle and I find it messy. So, I do not buy the tomato sauce.

The next ‘great bad idea’ is the car- locking and starting system that relies on the driver having a remote key, carried in a pocket or bag. As the driver approaches the car, it automatically unlocks and, once the driver is inside, the car is started by pushing a button on the dashboard. This remote start system has, for one leading manufacturer, a set of instructions that baffle me. Trust me, if I am confused, so are many others. But instructions or not, the big flaw is that the remote key and the car are in constant communication if the key is within, say, 20 m of the car. This means that car thieves can use an antenna to receive the key signals and rebroadcast them to the car while the key is inside a house. Then, the car unlocks, the start button is pressed and away they go. Genius, who thought this up? It sounds like a fake story but West Midlands police released a video about it and there are other confirmed reports.

The next great non-idea, a bit old, was/ is the plan that involved replacing all the control wires or hydraulics in aircraft with a cylinder that operates the controlled surface. The cylinder is computer controlled. This has, in fact, largely taken place in many aircraft. The problem is that control wires and hydraulics do not really need electricity, but computers do. Thus, when the power fails, there has to be backup power and backup to the backup. In one case, the captain, irritated by the fact that the flight assistance computer (FAC) kept giving alarms, opened the circuit breakers that fed the FAC. This caused all control surfaces to reset to a default position, which caused the aircraft to stall and crash. Hey, they should have kept the hydraulics.

But nothing is seemingly learned. Right now, the world is learning of self-driving cars and there is some sort of muted assent that these are going to become commonplace. Are they really? Doubtless, they have never heard of the Toyota ‘unintended acceleration’ incidents, where drivers claimed that they had been driving and the Toyota accelerated out of control. There were lawsuits aplenty. Toyota recalled numerous vehicles. Finally, the US Department of Transport concluded that, other than a number of incidents caused by accelerators hanging up on incorrectly fitted floor mats, the accidents were caused by drivers depressing their accelerators when they intended to apply their brakes. ‘Pedal misapplication’ was the department’s delicate terminology for this pheno- menon. This was after the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration had investigated the matter thoroughly. So, driverless cars? A whole new world of lawsuits where ‘drivers’ claim it is all the fault of the car. How can the manufacturers not grasp this? Dumb.