BMW E31 840Ci

I Was watching an NFL game the other night. The Detroit Lions have the new unenviable record of 0-16. That is, they've lost every single game they've played this close-season. That's appalling, but probably mirroring the rest of Motown's current issues. It is disastrous and should mean something, other than the humiliation on the pitch. But in the NFL? No, no. They just start next season all over again.

So in a total of 32 teams - two linear divisions or conferences, AFC and NFC, no relegation - then you have a sound corps of regular players. So out of 300m people, you can sort of understand the astronomical wages. So....what if you fail to win the Heismann trophy and from college, don't make the draft, make the big league? What do you do? Get a job?

No. You play in Canada. You go North. Like Warren Moon. A great quarterback. He spent his early professional career sucking it up in the Canadian League. He became known for throwing the perfect spiralling ball. Why? Well, it get's so cold up North, that you throw 'flat', then you run the risk of it catching in the air or wind and it will float, and then not hit your target. If you spiral it, twist it's motion, you can partly negate that, and get it to your teammates. He became the arch-proponent of this technique, and had some blinding seasons in Canada, was snapped up by the Oilers and on the way to getting a $10m contract in 1989, he set numerous, longstanding, records.

Primarily he developed a play for certain conditions. Pragmatism.

Now, carmakers don't often introduce innovative methods and solutions into their vehicles every day, but when they do, it has to be for a reason, not just for the sake of it.

Pragmatism.

Mechanical control systems tend to add weight. With various pulleys, cables, leads, hydraulic systems, cranks....all this adds weight to any machine that needs active inputs. Like an aircraft's flight control system. Saving weight is one of the profound parameters explored when designing a plane, and therefore some form of mitigation here is required. Hence the development over decades with fly-by-wire systems. Instead of the mechanical functions, computers, electrical signals and sometimes fibre-optic technology, is used in it's place. This, reduces weight, introduces an element of safety and fool-proofing into the system and can also allow for a graduation in the inputs that might be harder to deliver with an analogue system.

BMW was the first manufacturer to bring this technology into a production vehicle. The 8-Series harvested many new features for it's time, but this particular function, was introduced for a very specific purpose. It was inserted to suit a need, not just to be a technological first. Pragmatism.