Daily Archives: 24 December 2025

Automobile Technology for Drivers

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Demetria Gallegos, for The Wall Street Journal, asked a number of readers what they liked and didn’t like about the technologies in the cars they drive. She didn’t ask me, so here are my Goods, Wants, and Needs Improvements, based on my years with my 2023 Ford Escape SEL. If I don’t mention something it’s either because I’m satisfied with it as far as it goes, or I missed it.

What I think is good:

  • GPS Navigation. I had this on an earlier Fusion Hybrid, but it couldn’t tell whether I was on a main highway or on that highway’s frontage road; apparently the system was based on maps built from satellite 10m postings. The nav system in my Escape is much more accurate, seemingly using the finally much more ubiquitous 1m postings.
  • The sound system. I have very good AM/FM selection and reception, and I have the capability of selecting, instead, a DVD player (up from a CD player in that Fusion) or my own playlists from a thumb drive.
  • Heated seats. Mrs Hines’ third son was not raised up to be cold.
  • I get cruise control on the left side of my steering wheel and limited sound system and cell phone control on the right side. Very limited driver display controls.

What I want:

  • A Head Up Display. Some cars have these, but they’re jokes. What I want is a HUD that gives me my current speed, fuel state, power left on my battery (for those vehicles—not my Escape—that are mild hybrids. Plug-ins are not a player in my book), time/miles to my destination, time/distance to my next turn point and direction of turn, if I’ve loaded a destination. These nav data are on my dashboard GPS display, but a HUD lets me keep my eyes on the road and traffic. Also for the HUD would be my range rate to the vehicle in front of me

What badly needs improvement:

  • Better HOTAS. I should have control over the driver displays that let me select what driver displays I want visible—display by display rather than the Ford-defined clusters that I get, and I want to be able to put my driver displays where I want them. I should have HUD display controls in my HOTAS, too.
  • Dashboard display that includes the GPS Nav. Get rid of the touch screen aspect, and give me back my buttons, rockers, and toggle switches. It’s not possible to work a touch screen control without taking my eyes off the road and the traffic; it’s a stroll in the park to work physical controls by touch
  • Route editing. I can pick and choose among software-generated routes to a destination—, no toll roads, fastest route, avoid construction. But it’s deucedly cumbersome to modify a route at the turn point level. Since I’m doing this while parked, this would be an exception to my no touch screen. Google maps lets me, on my laptop, modify a route by dragging a point on a route to another place on the map and get an adjusted route. Let me do that on the displayed nav route.
  • More intuitive, somewhat more conversational voice commands. I shouldn’t have to memorize a long list of arcane menu and word sequences, especially for those commands I might want to execute but I don’t use often enough to have memorized the incantation words.
  • Better collision warning. I don’t need to hear about an impending collision after it’s too late for me to react, or after the alleged collision has been resolved—a car in front of me that’s slowing to make a turn, with the collision warning going off as he’s halfway through his turn and I still haven’t closed on him appreciably. Alternatively, get rid of the collision warning system altogether.
  • Better backup camera markings. The route projection lines are…optimistic. The route projection lines take me wide of my actual route. On the other hand, the red bar of my red/yellow/green proximity bars when I’m backing toward an obstacle are pessimistic. In any event, nothing beats my Mark I Eyeball while I’m backing, or changing lanes, come to that.

A Few Thoughts on Trump’s Partial Blockade

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President Donald Trump (R) has been increasing the US navy’s presence in the Caribbean Sea and near the coast of Venezuela. Within that, he’s declared a partial blockade against Venezuela, barring sanctioned oil ships from entering or leaving Venezuelan ports, and he has seized a couple of sanctioned oil tankers in Caribbean international waters. Sanctioned oil tankers carry some 70% of Venezuela’s crude oil.

Trump has made no bones about wanting, directly, some of Venezuela’s oil. It was stolen, and he wants it back, he says. He’s referring to the oil production and refining facilities that Hugo Chavez had seized in the years before Maduro took power.

There are two other factors in play, though, that I’ve not seen talked about. One is that Trump’s partial blockade also denies, I think by intent, Venezuelan oil to the People’s Republic of China. In 2024, the PRC imported a bit over $1 billion of oil from Venezuela, which amounted to a skosh under two-thirds of the PRC’s total imports from Venezuela. That’s chump change from the PRC’s perspective, even as it pushes the PRC a little bit more toward needing Russian and Iranian (sanctioned) oil. That brings me, though, to my other thought.

That other is that the moves deny Venezuela’s ability market its oil nearly entirely. Blocking sanctioned oil tankers would deny Venezuela the ability to sell those 70% of its oil exports. In 2025, before the sanctioned oil shipping blockade, Venezuela exported 900,000 barrels per day. If the partial blockade continues, it’ll reduce that oil export to 270,000 barrels per day. That’s a revenue drop, taking the market price as an outer bound on the price Venezuela can get for its shipping-sanctioned oil—$56.52/bbl for West Texas Intermediate Crude as of 19 December—from $54.8 million to $15.3 million.

And these, also, two side effects of the military buildup near Venezuela’s coast. One is Maduro has suddenly stopped gradually building his military presence in eastern Venezuela and threatening to invade Guyana with a view to seizing that nation’s oil fields.

The other is the potential for a cutoff of oil to Cuba, threatening that nation’s ability to function at all. In 2025, Cuba’s two largest sources of imported oil and fuel (Cuba imports more oil than it produces for itself) were Mexico, at 5,000 barrels per day and Venezuela at 27,400 barrels per day. That’s out of a total of 45,400 bpd that Cuba imports. That’s against Cuba’s domestic oil production of 40,000 bpd and the 120,000 bpd that the nation needs to meet demand.