A Car is Not A Toaster
My daily commute is almost exactly 25 miles door to door, mostly highway driving, with a bit of suburban sprawl on either end. The highway portion is long enough (and I've been doing it long enough) that I've had plenty of time to observe how my road-mates drive.
I've concluded that waaaaaay too many people treat their cars like appliances: turn the thing on, then there's one pedal for "go", and another pedal for "what the fuck was that?". In between, they're completely disconnected from the road: they most frequently focus on clamping the cell phone between the ear and shoulder, and of course there are other distractions, many of which are understandable, but most of the time they're just zoning out.
IMNSHO, this is no condition to be in when you're piloting two tons (or three, if it's one of those giant SUVs) down the road at somewhere near a hundred feet per second.
My take on it is that if you're not aware of what's going on around you, and count on being able to hit the "WTF?" pedal any old time, you're gonna end up turning someone into a statistic.
(p.s.: a good friend of mine, when he saw the title, thought I was going to write about de-chroming a car. Ha ha, fooled you, Dave.)