There’s a just-released dashcam video of the moment a self-driving car smashed into a Nash County, N.C., sheriff’s deputy cruiser while the “driver” watched a movie on his iPhone.
How embarrassing.
The crash actually occurred in 2020, but we’re only now allowed to see the video. The driver, unnamed, recently had the charges against him dismissed.
But … why?
The driver was clearly and purposely endangering others. Why not throw the book at him?
I’m not usually the paranoid type, but as I mentioned recently in another column, these days “paranoid” just means “three weeks ahead of the news cycle.”
So maybe—just maybe—pushing the cause of fully-autonomous driving is more important than a single dumb driver.
But stick a pin in that thought for a moment.
No carmaker has yet to nail fully autonomous driving. That’s why there are laws against letting the computer do the work while the driver watches TV or whatever.
The tech is improving rapidly, I’m sad to say.
I’ve spent years saying that self-driving cars are a very complicated solution in search of a problem. There are limited cases where self-driving cars do make sense, I admit. My grandfather suffered from macular degeneration and really could have used one by the time he was in his late 60s.
My Lazy Dad side wishes the car would pick the kids up from school, itself, but my Good Dad side would never trust my sons to a machine like that.
The thing is, I like driving. The act of driving a car requires attention and a small amount of skill, and the better you get at it the more enjoyable it is. Safer, too.
Back in my single days, I took a lot of road trips. Sometimes to a specific destination, other times with nothing more than a general direction in mind and a few changes of clothes in a duffel bag. The journey was its own reward, and the act of driving was a big part of each journey.
One time I took a 1977 Mercedes 450 SL, top down, up to Montana, back when there was no daytime speed limit on the interstate. Just because I could.
Freedom, baby.
Lately I think less about road trips than I do about self-driving cars actually being a solution to a problem.
To the government’s problem.
You.
You and your personal freedom to move around when and where you choose, to be more exact.
There’s more going on here than just the Big Government push for fully-electric, fully-autonomous vehicles.
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You might have read back in December that Presidentish Joe Biden’s so-called infrastructure law has a “kill switch” provision in it.
Deep within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law by President Joe Biden is a passage that will require automakers to begin including what can be best summarized as a “vehicle kill switch” within the operating software of new cars, which is described in the bill as “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology”. The measure has been positioned as a safety tool to help prevent drunk driving, and by 2026 (three years after the enactment of the Act, per the text) the kill switch could be mandated on every new car sold in the United States.
The bipartisan RIDE Act—thanks, wussy RINOs!—takes that provision further with mandated car technology that would “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.”
If the computer in your car thinks you’re impaired—and we all know how reliable computers are, right?—then the autonomous driver would take over, pull you onto the curb, and the kill switch would shut you down.
It’s a safe bet the nannybot would alert the local authorities, too.
Nobody likes drunk drivers, but that’s a largely solved problem. The combination of harsher punishments and social pressures has dramatically reduced drunk driving deaths over the last few decades.
(I’m old enough—barely—to remember when even otherwise responsible grownups would actually boast about their drunk driving skills.)
So: Combine remote “kill switch” technology with fully autonomous driving technology, and what do you get?
I can certainly tell you what you wouldn’t get: Thousands of truckers peacefully protesting against tyrannical government in Ottawa.
If I were Ron Klain, I’d maroon that California-to-DC truck convoy somewhere along the most desolate part of I-80 in Nebraska.
With the technology mandated just a few years down the road, he’d be able to do it, too.
No flying for the unvaccinated, the unmasked, and the so-called unruly.
And maybe no driving, either, because personal mobility is a threat to would-be autocrats anywhere.
I’ve been a techno-nerd and a gadget freak my entire life, but I’ve just now found two technologies I might be happy to see banned.
