The Problem with Self-Driving Cars

A fellow on Twitter said self-driving cars suck because they will kill many jobs.  That's not somewhere I agree as America is actually fairly good at building them and this is down home work.  Not bad at all.

Japan seems only to have the crumby Prius which isn't self-driving and is only a hybrid combustion / electric power vehicle.  It's already largely obsolete but the Lotus eaters in California still fancy them.  In general Euros are more imaginative with application of self-driving vehicles up to full-out big rig trucks but the technology doesn't seem such a difficult thing so likely that comes to America as well much like things come to Cincinnati.

"When the end of the world comes, I will move to Cincinnati and live five more years" - Mark Twain

America will get it eventually and it should fall to its knees in respect for Elon Musk for being perhaps the single most-innovative American.  Jobs died and Apple went straight to a money-counting scrap heap of progressive malaise.  Elon Musk is the new King.

Note:  Apple shit on the people who made them (e.g. progressive music makers and visual arts creators / producers) with this iPhone gimcrackery and there's never a good result from that.

(Tim Cook:  oh but it has two lenses now!)

Fuck off.


That America seems to do relatively well building self-driving cars is good to see with American workers doing it and the jobs stay at home.  Hear, hear!


However, self-driving cars don't serve any purpose beyond rental conveyance because sitting in a two-mile traffic jam (e.g. Boston, Dallas, and likely any big city) will be exactly the same regardless of whether the car can drive itself.

The pitch is the self-driving car will find a better way but that's rubbish.  Most people are habitual but some aren't so thick and the roads they use get just as plugged as the big ones.  I commuted from the 'burbs to the city in Cincinnati for years and that was up to two hours lost out of every day.  That thought would grind my gears more than anything else about it.

So what if the car could be self-driving as all it gives me is the freedom to work or screw with work.  Some type of visual apparatus may present something intriguing in some way but so fucking what.  All any of them say is there's something happening but it's not where you are in that crumby little car.


The problem isn't whether cars can drive themselves but rather there are too fucking many of them.  Any fool can see it at 5p.m. in any city in the country.  Cars back up for miles and you get home torqued and pissed so your evening is fucked until you can pull yourself together from it.  Many start hoisting brewskis at that point but, nooooo, they're not alcoholics.  Helps you sleep too, doesn't it (larfs).

Nothing like going to sleep by hitting your head with a hammer, I always say.

Note:  this isn't hypocrisy as the ganja doesn't even come close to making me sleepy, more accurately it does the opposite since the carousel spins faster and it shows all the colors along with such magnificent sound.  Who should sleep through this and waste it.

The smokes will easily kill sleep and reefer permits sleep, I just don't want to do it, but cigarettes bury any chance of it.


They want to build all these new self-driving cars, all available for a nominal premium with this wizard feature and we're sure will agree the added premium is fair.  In parallel, existing combustion vehicles, they say, will be grandfathered out of existence, recycled into Steel Heaven.

Ahem, that won't even be true fifty years from now and a Harley Davidson may still be pissing you off with its loud pipes a century from now.  Some internal combustion is built right and lasts for a long, long time.

The existing combustion vehicles likely won't be affected by the new self-driving vehicles except due to the normal annual attrition when cars just give up the ghost.  There is all the potential for people upgrading to self-driving cars but the last time I saw this much lack of enthusiasm, it may have been for a PeeWee Herman Live Sex Show.  It just ain't going to happen.

(Ed:  is that true about PeeWee Herman?)

Probably you already know what they said was true but he wasn't hurting anyone and maybe he was a bit warped but he was in a warped place where children would never go.  Even so, they arrested him and painted his name in shit in giant letters everywhere thus destroying his name and his career.  That mindless savagery is just one more example of American Puritanism in the New Age.


Is anyone seriously going to tell me you prefer sitting about for hours in a self-driving car talking about this crap and think this is better than taking a spin on the open road.  You feel the road and the tires through the wheel.  You feel the throttle response and know the response of the brakes but you try them anyway just to be sure.  All the while, you listen to the motor for anything untoward, any sound which shouldn't be there, and this time her voice rings clear and it's time to open her up and feel some wind in the face with the sound of a V-8 motor roaring to song others may never hear.

Yah, and you will give that up for a self-driving car?

Here, pull my finger (larfs).