Road Trips Have Evolved

If you were present in 1903 when the very first road trip across the country took place when Horatio Nelson Jackson drove from San Francisco to New York City you’d be absolutely appalled. How was he supposed to make this trek without GPS? What were he and his co-driver Sewall K. Crocker driving? Where would they get gasoline and how long would it take?

While this pair took over two months to cross the country, the road trip did evolve some in the middle of the last century, but you still had to be careful to have enough gasoline and never know where the next restaurant would be. This was no way to take a road trip, but it’s all they had at the time. Here are several ways your road trip of today is much better and certainly more evolved than the one from 1903.

Range per Tank – Right now you can drive much farther on a tank of gas than you ever could in the early days of road trips. With hybrid powertrains some cars can drive for more than 400 miles on a single fill up. Imagine the old days of driving when you had to stop every 100 to 200 miles to make sure you had enough gas because you had no idea where the next gas stop was, scary.

New Cars can Handle the Road – Advanced suspension designs, engine performances, efficiency number and response times mean that we can easily enjoy the ride on any road much better than before. Remember the old land yachts that were part of the driving landscape? Those are gone from existence now and you get to drive more athletic and capable vehicles that have been made within the last few years when you want to head out on a road trip.

Safer than Ever – Vehicles of today can not only handle the roads, even mountain passes, but they have advanced safety features to help you stay in control better. Not only do you have traction control and ABS, but you have the advantage of pre-collision detection, lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control and more to make sure you can stay safe in your vehicle. In the early days of driving power steering wasn’t even part of the equation, making road trips an adventure of work and driving that would leave you fatigued, but today you can almost allow your vehicle to do the driving for you.

For Your Listening Pleasure – Now you can have more choices than you ever did before regarding what you listen to in your vehicle. In early days you would spend time hitting the tune or search buttons to allow your radio to look for a station for you to listen to and even after that you might have had CD or cassette adapters to let you choose some of your music, but no more. Now that you can connect your phone wirelessly and choose a satellite radio station you can listen to anything you want on your road trip without any worry about losing signal or having to search for local stations.

No More Copilot Needed – There once was a time when you would require the passenger in the front seat to read off road maps to help you figure out where you needed to go. Now, with GPS navigation systems you not only have your directions given to you though the system, you can find a restaurant, gas station or hotel along the way and have precise direction to that destination, making it easy to plan and execute any road trip while not worrying about the trouble you could find which you would describe as an adventure later in life.

Your Car Can Look Amazing – Style is the name of the game with today’s automakers and so may vehicles are built with excellent looks and features that are a huge upgrade over the classic cars of many decades ago. You can choose to have black chrome or body colored bumpers on today’s cars. This gives you a style you can enjoy along your road trip across the nation which is much easier to execute than it ever was in the past.