Do you know just how bad you have to screw up in order to gain a “cease and desist” letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Pretty damn badly. You have to do something so blatantly stupid that it’s plainly obvious. And that is there that a little plastic ring, split in half, with magnets on the ends comes into play. It’s called the “Autopilot Buddy” and it’s use is simple. In a Tesla product with the Autopilot semi-autonomous driving mode, you have to keep a hand on the wheel. A pressure sensing system can determine that, and if it’s not happy, the car will nag the hell out of you to put a hand back on the wheel and pay attention as you do 75 miles an hour down your local Interstate. The Autopilot Buddy is designed to shut up the sensor system, so you can cruise hands-free without Tesla’s take on Bitching Betty rubbing your nerves raw.
It’s no secret that I’m no fan of autonomous tech in cars and trucks. There’s already systems for that: bus, train, plane, taxi and rideshare services. If you don’t want to drive, that’s all good, I get that. But we are not to the point where we can tell the car to take it from here before knocking out for a six-hour nap across Kansas. It’s just not to that point yet, and we still have at least another decade or two to go before we are there. There’s already been enough issues with semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, including the car versus pedestrian crash in Tempe, Arizona that might have been avoided, if the person behind the steering wheel wasn’t watching a show, or the guy in Britain who had shifted over to the passenger seat and really let the car handle itself.
Laziness knows no bounds. Seriously, check out the promotional video for the Autopilot Buddy. No wonder NHTSA came down on them like a ton of bricks. But don’t worry…tomorrow, someone will figure out how to use a Chippy Clippy, or zip ties, or some other MacGyver fix to shut up the car. You watch and see.
If autonomous systems were that good we’d haver a race series for them.
The claim is Tesla is a great car. Normal people want to drive great cars. How can Tesla be a great car if nobody wants to actually drive it? But then who says people who want “drive” autonomous cars are normal or even have any common sense? I agree with the sentence in this article that explains when don’t want to drive: “There’s already systems for that: bus, train, plane, taxi and rideshare services.” I will add, walk or stay home. When I get behind the wheel I want to be the one driving, not some machine.
I’m waiting to hear about the first case of autonomous road rage. Oh wait, wasn’t there a Terminator movie that showed that?
Let them do it….. It’s thinning morons out of our gene pool.
Problem is they are more likely to take out you or me or our families than themselves.