Will self-driving cars sell? What is the future of self-driving cars industry? Would you buy one?
We have an interesting poll going on here and would like your input.
[Total_Soft_Poll id=”2″]Power, testosterone, freedom – can you tame that?
Will this high-tech novelty they call SELF-DRIVING CARS make us all feel like Stallone felt in Demolition Man? Craving for a good old hot rod and the squealing sound of tires? Are we sentenced to life at 30 mph speed limit?
POWER, TESTOSTERONE, FREEDOM!
The system takes away our dignity. Cops take our right to knock some prick’s teeth out. Wives take our ballz. In reality, society has successfully stripped us from every ounce of control and freedom of choice.
All we’ve got left, to blow some self-esteem and feel in control for at least a while, is our beloved 4-wheel pleasure. That’s the only thing that is still allowing us to feel young, powerful and free.
Nothing beats this feeling…
That moment you put your ass in the seat and start the engine. When you hear the roar of the beast under the hood. When you smell all those wonderful gases coming out from the exhaust. When you feel how your muscles are contracting in anticipation of the move. Move, that will take you somewhere far away. Away from the crowd. Away from the pissed off nagging wife. Away from the mother-in-law. Away from your hated boss.
Will all that be gone?
Our contemporary way of life is demanding that we obey, that we be humble, that we be grateful.
Grateful for fucking what?
The fact that we can barely put food on the table even though we work our asses off?
The fact that we can’t even afford three different pairs of great shoes or branded clothes?
The fact that we are not allowed to kick the shit out of that fat prick that calls himself the boss?
The only thing we can be grateful for is the invention of the internal combustion engine. And people like François Isaac de Rivaz, Siegfried Marcus, Karl Benz, Henry Ford and particularly William R Morris, the first real sports car manufacturer.
Unfortunately, even this one last pleasure we managed to keep, will soon be taken away from us – forever.
It’s not enough that we are being castrated all over the fucking place. They now want us to sit tight, like Mrs. Daisy, buckle up and read emails while some freakin’ invisible toaster is driving us around – at the speed of the snail that suffers from rheumatoid arthritis.
A million toasters behind the wheel equal million Mrs. Daisies equal one slow fucking world!
Be honest, how do you feel when some slow ass driver is taking away the precious minutes of your life, driving at the speed of a turtle, for miles in front of you?
You wanna kill his ass! That’s how you feel.
Now, replace the slow ass driver with the toaster.
At least, when it’s some daisy behind the wheel, you can honk or issue a loud verbal threat. But most likely, you’ll press it to the max and leave that sissy in a dust.
You can’t pull that same shit with a toaster.
Because: A) toasters don’t give a fuck about your honking, B) couldn’t care less about your insults, and C) there’s no freakin’ pedal to press(!)
And it’s that C) that’s been bugging us mostly.
It appears that you’ll enter the vehicle, issue a vocal order to your toaster and the car will slowly start moving; led by the advanced GPS system and gazillion other little things they’ll put in the car’s computer.
The problem is obvious: what if you wake up late, knowing that you just can’t miss that presentation?
There’s no fucking pedal to press! There’s no plastic man behind the wheel whose head you can twist and throw out to take over the vehicle. You’ll be late. And you know what that means, don’t you? Yeah, your ass is fired.
How happy will your wife be if something like this happens? How grateful will your son be when you inform him how tuition money must be used for canned goods rather than his higher education?
All because you weren’t able to press the goddamn pedal and speed up that crappy plastic-made vehicle.
But hey, don’t worry. After you pick up your shit and leave the building to get home and slam yourself in some bourbon, the toaster will greet you with: “It’s a great day. Where do you want to go now, Mrs. Daisy?”
To the fucking gun store, that’s where.
OK, OK, we went too far. You’re a responsible adult. You know when to get up to get there on time. If nothing else, you’ll feel safe knowing that such an advanced computer, deprived of all emotions, is driving you to work. The possibility of the accident is reduced to bare minimum. The car is steered by rules, regulations and pure logic. Nothing bad can happen, right?
How many antivirus programs do you have right now?
In 2008, Pentagon suffered a massive damage when the virus spread all over the super-protected military network. All it took was one single infected flash drive, inserted in just one of the army’s laptops.
March 2011, a coordinated cyber attack. Pentagon loses 24,000 sensitive files.
And that’s freakin’ Pentagon we are talking about here. What do you think they can do to a fucking self-driving car, connected to the high-speed, broadband internet?
Don’t want to sound paranoid, but do you honestly believe that the one who’ll be writing the code for the toaster won’t leave some backdoor to access the main and all of the subsystems any time he wants? In fact, coders must enable this feature for the ease of access in case of emergency. How long before some leet hacker figures out the access string?
Cutting the brakes or placing the bomb under the driver’s seat is thing of the past. You now just have to hire a hacker to fuck up the security and take over the controls. Motherfucker will drive your ass over the cliff and there’s nothing you can do to stop it!
Or, how about a coordinated DDoS attack on city’s traffic network or car software? How’s that for fun?
Don’t forget, all car manufacturers will be using one and the same provider of the main chip/system. Because only one will be “the best.”
And please don’t buy into that “it-can’t-happen” nonsense.
Whatever is digital, it can be accessed and manipulated.
After all, someone originally wrote the code. That means there’s a possibility. And when there’s a possibility, someone will figure out how to bypass the security protocols.
How about that? There you are, sipping coffee and reading Wall Street Journal on the car’s tablet, Jimmy the Toaster is telling you the global news and the weather forecast while driving 25 mph, following the river of other Jimmies who are doing the same for their passengers.
Relaxed and comfy, your mind is already planning tomorrow’s golf game with a couple of your buddies. You totally forgot all about that dreadful fight you had with your lovely spouse an evening before.
It wasn’t the first one either. Things changed. You can feel something’s off. She’s different.
And while you are imagining your first swing at that wonderful golf course, some chickenshit momma’s boy, sitting down in his parent’s cellar, is using all of his ten fucking fingers to hack into your car. After all, you’re online, reading WSJ. That means access.
Suddenly, Jimmy starts yelling, “MALFUNCTION! PROXIMITY ALERT! PROXIMITY ALERT! LEAVE THE VEHICLE NOW! LEAVE THE VEHICLE NOW!”
Only, you can’t do shit about it because the doors are locked and you can only watch your final seconds before Jimmy slams your small-piece-of-shit-self-driving car into the fast-approaching truck.
That nerdy dick managed to overtake the controls of your self-driving can, increase the speed to the max and swing your vehicle on the opposite lane in just the right moment.
Yeah, there are few cameras on your self-driving microwave. The one who takes over the system can see what Jimmy sees.
But hey, don’t worry, it will be a nice funeral. Although, the coffin will be closed. There’s no plastic surgeon on this planet who can patch that fucked up face back again. It’s FUBAR. Hitting the approaching truck at the high speed does that to a face, you know.
Grieving wife is left with a generous life policy. She only needs to send five grand to that little prick on the other side of the planet and that’s it. She’s finally free and shit loaded with money.
That’s your likely “automated and safe” future, my friend.
The word or two about Regulators and professional Moralists
We don’t even have to go that far. Maybe you have a loving wife, who doesn’t want you dead. She just wants you to be safe and sound. That’s why she bought you a self-driving car. She knows how reckless and fast driver you are so she’s worried about your well-being.
What made her buy that digital piece of moving crap was this: gazillion of wonderful limits and safety features they put inside.
They call it “Extended Safety in Traffic” or EST.
Show a finger, we’ll cut the power. Get loud and your car will park your ass on the side where you’ll wait for the moral police to arrive and charge you for indecent behavior. Try messing up with the system and you’ll get electrocuted.
Yeah, we made up that term. But they will come up with some similar bullshit, have no doubt in that. Your ass won’t be moving faster than 30 mph on the open road EVER AGAIN! Remember that.
Now, after analyzing all these wonderful features and possibilities of the self-driving cars, what do we think about the future of that industry? Is it a safe investment already now?
Will Google ban your account for some alleged illegal online activity and prevent you from accessing your car until you clear that shit?
What the future looks for self-driving car industry?
It’s great that they are putting all those efforts in complete digitalization of our society. All the current stuff that we have at our disposals like internet, search engines, digitalized state’s administration, and few other things, are really helpful.
But that shit just gotta stop somewhere. We simply can’t allow that every segment of our lives is controlled by some remote computer.
This specifically goes to our cars!
Don’t get this the wrong way. We have nothing against electric cars and chargers based on renewable energy sources. Some of those things move extremely fast. Like Rimac Concept S, a battery-driven monster that reaches 62 mph in just 2,5 seconds and has 1384 hp, enough to reach the top speed of astonishing 227 mph!
We just don’t want to be stripped of this last thing we can control and that’s the steering wheel of the car and the accelerator pedal.
Yes, it can be deadly. Yes, people die in car crashes. But people also die from earthquakes, random acts of violence, drugs, cancers, bee bites, and million other things. And while we can’t control some causes of death, we sure as hell can control our cars.
Bottom line is that we firmly believe that this whole thing with self-driving cars will be a short-lasting hype. Nobody really likes being controlled by some advanced microwave oven.
The only way for this engineering concept to work is if they leave the auto-pilot option on a driver’s sole discretion. Just put the damn button. The on/off switch that allows us to choose the driving mode.
Try to take away control and you’ll end up with the groups of lone rebels who will take out their hidden gas-driven hot rods out of their garages at 2 AM and wreak havoc all over the place. Jimmies and their Daisy passengers sure as hell won’t feel comfy when a couple of guys start skiing among them with full throttle.
But that’s just us.
How about you? How do you feel about all this self-driving car frenzy?
Are you gonna buy one and enjoy the feeling of being at a mercy of a couple micro-motherboards, some silicon and few billions of zeros and ones, all assembled by the cheapest provider?
Let’s hear what you have to say about all that.
