The following is reprinted in whole from today’s Automotive News, which is infested with automotive journalists who’ve guzzled whole cauldrons of Naderite/Claybrookian Kool Aid and are now indistinguishable in their outlook from the Naders and Claybrooks – all of them crooning uniformly for more mandated “safety” technology – and looking crossly at an apostate who suggests that perhaps these things ought to flow organically, and people free to choose for themselves:
“I have heard a lot about the features and advantages of autonomous vehicles and how they are being tested on some public roads and highways.
Meanwhile, I have contended that these vehicles should be tested on company proving grounds and not on public roads. Needless to say, my cries are being ignored.
So if self-driving vehicles are safe enough to test on the same roads used by everyone else, why aren’t carmakers putting the same safety technology into today’s production cars? Anything they use in cars that they’re willing to test on public roads should be in the production vehicles they sell.
Level 3 autonomous vehicles have quite a few life-saving features that would be great additions to today’s cars. Some manufacturers already offer these features on production cars and trucks, and that makes a lot of sense.
They are touting the advantages of adaptive cruise control, for example, and I have no doubt that rear-end crashes are a major cause of fatal accidents.
Automatic emergency braking — which detects an impending forward crash and applies the brakes to avoid the crash or reduce its severity — is another feature that could save plenty of lives if all new vehicles were equipped with it. And there is no indication that lawyers would prevent its use on grounds that it is untested.
I’m unsure how many features being tried out on autonomous test vehicles can be immediately adapted to production vehicles, but no doubt some could be saving lives today.
Yet these features seem to be dribbling out slowly, one at a time from certain makes.
If they work now, everyone should be able to use them now.
In fact, if carmakers do not adapt these features soon they’d better watch out because the government will force them to.
You can reach Keith Crain at kcrain@crain.com ”Â
Make my teeth hurt.
How about yours?
Here’s another good one. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/10/19/we-know-suv-design-kills-pedestrians-but-we-still-let-carmakers-sell-them
SUV’s kill people when they hit them. Ban SUV’s
Morning, OP!
I feel more and more like a stranger in a very strange land. Almost to a man (and woman) my “colleagues” in the car press are politically correct poltroons, gefreiters in the politically correct platoon. Most don’t even like cars – and forget understanding what makes them go. Many do not even know how to drive a car with a manual transmission. Really. But they love asking barbed questions about diversity and berating the car companies for not being enough of that – as well as leg humping every proposed/possible new “safety” idea, demanding that the car companies add it to their vehicles before the government gets around to mandating it.
I stick out like Mr. T at a DAR meeting.
“Colleagues” indeed. The current crop are no more car journalists than their cousins in the other areas of the new media are news journalists, all of them singing, from the same apostate hymnal, the same false tunes to the same grating score.
Among that bunch, you stick out like a white bean in a black cat’s ass. Be proud of the difference between you and the gaggle.
Thanks, Ed!
Have a look at this, speaking of which: (Full rant coming on the same topic)
http://www.autonews.com/article/20171025/OEM11/171029818/environmental-ford-vw-cafe-fuel-economy
Everyone’s a Jesse Jackson these days. Well Jesse is rich with no real talents or abilities. Also he didn’t get shot. That’s more telling than people realize.
At some point all the good competent working people are going to give up. Then what?
Hi Brent,
I wonder.
Speaking just for me, a cozy RV seems more and more appealing, especially if I can truly swear off women for good!
The streetsbloggers…. where it is always the motorist’s fault.
Oh God, that was too much. I can’t read that pearl clutching and ankle biting more than one sentence. As the author would probably say: “It give me the vapors.”
Thanks for putting it in a lighter colored text, but nope, I have a strong constitution but not for that kind of writing.
I hope an autonomous tank on a test mission drives right through his front door and crushes his toes at is passes on through out the back porch and onward then keeps on going per apera ad astra. May the caissons of progress, even if bad progress, ever keep rolling along.
One significant factor of autonomy, and there are many, in fact, is accountability for one’s actions. If an automobile is autonomous (which by the definition of autonomy, it can never be) who will get the ticket, or the bill for property damage, or the jail time in the event of the “car’s” poor choice of driving options? The car? No! You will. The car has no status as an entity, and the programmer (who is the one actually making the automated choices) will be completely free from accountability; he doesn’t own the var, YOU do. and only a person can be fined, held responsible, and or imprisoned for his/her actions……the “autonomous” car will Not.
You, the owner, will be held 100% accountable, financially, morally, and legally. The car will not, which of course, is exactly what is required of anyone (notice I did not say any “thing”) that has, or is recognized as having, autonomy. Autonomy requires free will, or the capability of making willful choices, which no “thing” can ever do. Automation is the programming of action and reactions of “things” which do not possess free will. The two are opposites and very mutually exclusive of one another, period.
Verbal trickery and marketing are both intended to convince us of what is not an actuality. This garbage is all in an effort to create an artificial demand for something that does not exist, a Utopia of Technological Perfection. Next people will be legislating physicians to sell them immortality!
Interesting.
Notice how when certain minorities do certain things.
We are told, “he was a good boy. he dindu nithing wrong. he wanted to join the army when he turned 18. He didn’t mean anyone any harm.”
Or when military aged male “refugees” are resettled in our society, they operate under different expectations.
Or that illegals violate untold numbers of laws, and not much can be done, there’s no record for them even to have violated. So how are they to be charged with crimes.
And really, what is the point of the whole criminal justice dog and pony racket. It never does anybody any good.
If some guy breaks in your house and steals $50,000 worth of stuff.
Are you any better if he is caught or not. It’s not like you’ll ever see any of the $50,000.
Why even bother telling the police, what are they going to do for you.
Better paying a private party to assist you in doing something. You can devise some kind of justice or repayment plan, and then execute it. Maybe you harm someone you feel is to blame. Or maybe you go rob 10 different Wally worlds of $5000 each until society has made you whole again.
People are conditioned to take every imaginable injustice laying down. What if you refuse to take it any more, and find your own quos you unleash, whenever a quid is done to you.
Stop reading the crime news. Watching it, or listening to it on the radio. It’s all a bunch of lies and misrepresentations only an autistic asshole would even countenance.
Anyone else in the world looking at this blog knows we’re either Americans or North Koreans, because our every other word is about government, because that’s the only thing they haven’t yet robbed us of.
Wow, the ignorance of simple economics now a days……………… Let alone the idea of making your own choices.
Doesn’t even even think of the cost to car buyers? Nope….. the costs be damned,,,,,,its for the children. Sure he didn’t say that but somebody will.
Never mind that for some drivers (like myself and Eric) these systems may be actually more dangerous for us. I may lose control of a car when I am fighting the computer for control of it. I don’t need (or want, or afford) a nanny. These systems will cause wrecks in some cases instead of preventing them. When a computer tries to prevent a lane change, the driver may end up oversteering fighting the (unwanted and unneeded) feedback in the steering wheel. A computer cannot think, and the designers never think of these things. It will make the wrong choices at times.