Don’t lose hope every time Elon Musk says some more insane nonsense to keep himself and his businesses on the news cycle. Remember that there are other people out there doing the exact same thing for a lot less return.
This week, you need look no further than Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, who claimed that their upcoming “Project T3” EV pickup truck will let you have a nap in the middle of a journey, so long as the day is sunny and that trip is on the highway.
You know, like the no self-preservation people who have been doing it on Teslas and are occasionally caught on camera, but with software that could actually allow you to do that. And if they manage it, it’s going to be great…for other people
Yes, I’m one of those. I generally distrust the self-driving car. Maybe it has to do with a deep-seated belief that (barring a few exceptions) all of our profession is bad at its job. Maybe it’s just the lack of clarity on how it works when exposed to reality. Who is responsible when my self-driving car plows into another car. And if I’m not driving, why is that my insurance premiums are the ones going up. Then you have things like stupid decisions nerfing self driving and making it more likely to crash onto things that it can’t really gauge the distance of?
See Tesla, these are small, those are far away.
The most amusing bit of the report for me is really unrelated to the technology. As far as I can tell that one is unlikely to revolutionize the way we interact with our cars in any reasonable timeframe like electrification did. Jeff Atwood is very likely to defeat John Carmack on this one. Crucially, it comes to the light just a little bit after we get some impressive footage of something that no computer can predict. A tire ejecting from a vehicle and providing a sobering reminder of the amount of energy your average tire carries by flinging away a Kia soul like it was made of papier mache. Fortunately the driver and sole passenger of the flying Kia reportedly got our of the car without any serious injuries. But it made me thing about the people who will inevitably not be so lucky, fall asleep on their car and then be interrupted on the way to their destination in a more permanent matter.
On the other hand, merely tired people, uninterested people, the ones who see driving as something to do because of the moral issues regarding teleportation. These are more consistently dangerous than a flock of self-driving cars would be. On the other, other hand, these same people will probably not bother keeping that system updated or its sensors in good condition as the car ages. As ever, it’s a situation where you wish that the solution was as easy as the soundbites would make you believe it is.
Keep your eyes open.
