If Microsoft Built Cars

Occasionally, one of those annoying urban legend e-mails actually tickles my fancy instead of raising my ire. Such was the case with the one I got this morning from a well meaning and sincerely intelligent friend who apparently did not have the time to check the facts before hurriedly dropping the following humorous yet untrue ditty into eleventy-nine unsuspecting e-mail inboxes. Thereby, she assisted in perpetuating the urban legend for another untold number of years throughout the dark vastness we at Bonez loving call the interwebs. Thus, Bonez Readers, witness the virtual horror of the spammed urban legend below:

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." [FALSE: According to Snopes]


In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:


If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought 'Car95' or 'CarNT', and then added more seats.

5. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

6. Apple would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single 'This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation' warning light.

8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would ask 'Are you sure?' before deploying.

10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. You'd have to press the 'Start' button to turn the engine off

P.S. I'd like to add that when all else fails, you could call 'customer service' routed to some foreign country and receive instructions from a heavily accented difficult to understand foreigner calling himself Bob Smith on how to fix your car yourself!