The Automobile as an Object

Let’s begin with a simple analogy. Suppose you want to drive a car and make it go faster by pressing its accelerator pedal. What must happen before you can do this? Well, before you can drive a car, someone has to design it. A car typically begins as engineering drawings, similar to the blueprints that describe the design of a house. These drawings include the design for an accelerator pedal. The pedal hides from the driver the complex mechanisms that actually make the car go faster, just as the brake pedal hides the mechanisms that slow the car, and the steering wheel hides the mechanisms that turn the car. This enables people with little or no knowledge of how engines, braking and steering mechanisms work to drive a car easily.

Before you can drive a car, it must be built from the engineering drawings that describe it. A completed car has an actual accelerator pedal to make the car go faster, but even that’s not enough—the car won’t accelerate on its own (hopefully!), so the driver must press the pedal to accelerate the car.