I can see niches for driverless vehicles on standardized routes. But how often are you driving in a neighborhood and you see some kids playing basketball in their yard and some youngsters on bikes and you slow down knowing the inevitable kid will run in front of you? Or some homeless person at the corner who you know is randomly going to cross? Or the kid on a skateboard?
Driverless cars will never respond to hose situations.
“Hit the road, Jack” sung by Ray Charles to cars with drivers at the behest of driver-less car manufactures.
Do you want to know what is really soul sucking?
A few months ago I went to my doctor’s office for some minor thing, and when I came out I noticed the same older gentleman waiting in th lobby as when I had arrived may 30 minutes before. It turns out he has been waiting over an hour for a cab to arrive to take him about 1/2 mile to a prosthetic showroom for his artificial leg. He needs the cab because he can no longer drive.
I was in no hurry, so I drove him over to his destination. The point is not to signal my great virtue in giving an old man a ride, but to point out that, as we drove over, I kept thinking that I sure hope they hurry up with those self-driving cars so I can buy one before I get old enough to not be able to drive for myself.
The real soul suck comes when one can’t get around on his own any longer and has to take cabs, or an Uber, and waste a huge amount of time waiting in mind-numbing places.
No one is going to take your little deuce coupe away from you when self driving becomes available. But it is going to mean freedom for a lot of people. And we are no longer going to have to take granny’s keys when she becomes a danger — just get her a car that doesn’t require her to be a road hazard every time she goes to bingo.
Driverless cars are not so much “anti-American” as the issue of them is that their objective is just one part of the “wussification” of human beings. Human beings will need to quit exposing their brains to tackle any task, because robots and automation can do everything better than any human being or any group of human beings, and A.I. is already “proving” that. That is not a sarcastic statement. That is straight from the new religion of the arrogant technologists. Some of their biggest fellow travelers have even suggested that robots and humans need to “merge”.
“right of passage”?
I completely agree with the premise of the article. Driverless cars are a leftist wet dream.
Oh, and “Little Red Corvette” by Prince isn’t a road song. May I suggest “Born To Be Wild” by Steppenwolf?
I’m still upset about horseless carriages.
I have that very same decked out Impala in my garage, but in original Cashmere Blue. It’s in the class of, “Clean Survivor”. It’s not frame off restoration, but has been taken care before I bought it in 2013, and I’ve done much more. I consider my Impala to have the best lines on any 1950’s design. It’s a piece of art.
Taking a girl on a date could be bery entertaining with a driverless car.
Just a warning to fathers and mothers.
Bad To The Bone is the first song on one my thumb drives for my Impala. I have a photo on my FB page with my 58 Impala sitting next to the original 58 Plymouth Fury from the movie Christine. It’s beyond cool.
imagine being one of the outsiders..the non demon party and Christian...
you could not go anywhere except with govt approval.
I would also like to congratulate the author for the single best headline of the last 20 years. Outstanding.
Just in case anyone buys the story that killing the pedestrian was “unavoidable,” even the far-left British “Guardian” disagrees:
Because the wussie-boys of today don't care about cars, unless they have all the hi-tech gadgets.
“Could there be anything less American than driverless cars?”
Democrats. “
How many have died over the same timeframe from vehicles operated by humans who were drunk, drugged, fatigued, distracted, senile, ill, or operating on fundamentally flawed programming?
Let's end the senseless carnage of human-operated vehicles once and for all!
Welcome to the future. If one wants to be nostalgic, pining for the past, one might also remember how unreliable most cars were not so long ago.
And in a pursuit of rugged individualism, shouldn't you really be hand-cranking the engine to start it? After all, having an electric motor turn over the engine is wussy. And what about electric windows. Don't really need those. Remember the fun of being on the highway with the windows down when you encountered a thunderstorm and you can't reach across the seats to rollup the passenger side window. Good times.
And tires. Those steel belted, tubeless 40-thousand mile tires we have nowadays are for wimps. Natural rubber tires with inner tubes. The ones that would suffer 3 or 4 blowouts on a 120 mile trip requiring a 20 minute pit stop at the side of the road. Made more fun again if it was raining. Or the middle of Winter. Tires for a real man!
And lets not forget electronic ignition. It's a damn computer chip running the engine! A real man would deal with cleaning dirty ignition points and adjusting the engine timing every other week. And don't forget the proper setting on that manual choke. Set it too rich and you flood the engine. Set it too lean and you exhaust the battery. it took skill and finesse to start a car back in the good old days!
And those sealed batteries. Who wants a sealed battery that's good for 3 or 4 years when you can have a real man's battery where you need to check the electrolytic level and add distilled water periodically. It's like a home chem lab experiment! What fun! And try not to splash any of the battery acid on the dog. His coat is already looking kind of mangy.
No; I like Heinlein's old quote. “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
Hot Rod Race (Hawaii version)