Can Detroit Beat Google to the Self-Driving Car?
Inside GM's fight to get to the future first.
Apparently this isn't the world it used to be. It's definitely a world where millions will wait outside in the snow to buy the latest i-Gadget even when last weeks model is in their pocket, but we're keeping cars far, far longer than once we did. You can drive home in a 700+ horsepower car, in a car that does 230 or more miles per hour and gets mileage equal to my old /68 VW. In fact we're in a golden age of American performance and engineering and we don't know. No sir, your 200 HP Nissan isn't a race car.
Some people still like to drive. Some people grew up when the number one aspiration was a car and the number two goal was something cool enough to turn heads at the drive in: the Drive In everything that was, from theaters to restaurants to, believe it or not, liquor stores. We didn't hang out at WiFi hotspots in malls. It was at Henry's Hot Dogs or Big Daddy's Drive in with car hops and looking to impress the girls and an occasional contest of acceleration. Real girls that is and in person, not on line. Tinder was still something you started a fire with.
What kind of people want a car that drives itself, controlled by satellites and computers and government regulations in soulless safety and always in constant contact and a play list? Sorry, you'll take away the steering wheel, the handlebars, the shift lever from my cold dead fingers but you'll have to catch me first.
Is this a case of industry spending a fortune on something that won't sell? Or is this a case of a country that's lost it's soul? Will my grandchildren read "On The Road" and wonder why Kerouac didn't take the bus or dream about a little electric Japanese cliche on wheels that drives itself while you stare at a little screen texting your "friends?" Indeed why go on the road at all when there's Google Earth?Sorry, that's not "the future" to me any more than today is the future once envisioned in generations of Science Fiction. If it's a country of driverless, cubicle dwelling, commuting urban virtual reality, Facebooking hipsters with "devices" it's not my country and that's a warning, not a prediction. Look for it. Listen for it somewhere off that regulated futureroad road packed with little electric safety bubbles shaped like running shoes or backwards hats whispering along, bumper to bumper at 25 MPH. Do you hear that rumble, way out on the highway? That long, lonesome highway?
Well, look at the benefits. Hands free driving means you can text in the front seat and sext in the back seat ... oh the perks and privileges of the new millennials. Jealous?
ReplyDeleteJealous? Not at all.
ReplyDeleteActually I don't have a back seat. I am however, starting to understand people who say they've lived too long. Not long age there was news coverage of the cops trying to stop a motorcyclist for texting on I-95.
ReplyDeleteCars are being designed for those Millennials. They hire video game developers to make them look like the cars they grew up with on video games so we have cars that look like Sonic the Hedgehog, they have faces on them and lots of fake scoops and "transformer" features. Very little of anything is designed for adults in a world where to be over 35 is to be the butt of a thousand jokes by people who can't use a pencil and wet their pants at being disconnected from the matrix.
Or...the car becomes part of the workplace. The two hours Californians spend going to and from work, become an extension of the 8-hour day.
ReplyDeletePlus, by 2050 it will all be electric anyway. The first of the overwhelming ecological and weather impacts of climate change will have started by then....and everyone will be freaked out.
Delete2050 - ah, let me just say that the "cold dead fingers" premise should be a reality by then.
DeleteBut the car as part of the workplace scenario is already real judging from all the communicating going on, but I recall seeing, even back in days of yore, commuters with newspapers spread out on the steering wheel, commuters putting on make up and similar horrors. Hell, everything is an extension of the workplace and the workplace may also be the place to fritter away time on social media.
But hey, as the prophet told us: get your motor runnin', head out on the highway - while yu can.
Speaking of overwhelming impacts, I have always maintained: Someday when the White House is under water, I will occupy it (read: octopy) along with my presidential cabinet of trusted advisors -- Sarah Barracuda, the Eel brothers, Hoppp-a-Long Horseshoe, and Al Sharkton.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a true Octopia where we can focus on Cthulhuian values as our flounder fathers intended.
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