I hereby prognosticate that the above headline will definitely come true someday, sooner or later. Six college sophomores, piled into a four passenger driverless car, (plenty of room, with two being in the trunk)(my beloved daughter and her high school friends tried that once-upon-a-time) will arrive in Fairbanks, Alaska in March, looking for the beach. They won’t find one. But hold on, you say, the distance from UW-Oshkosh to Fairbanks is 3,327 miles. How could they possibly ride that far without realizing they weren’t headed for Florida? To which I say, they never bothered to look out the window. They all had their heads down, glued to their cell phones and video games, for two days and a three nights, nonstop. Don’t be so surprised. This is normal behavior for college sophomores. (In fact, it’s pretty much normal behavior for everybody these days, even when they’re driving.) But what about bathroom stops, you ask. Studies have shown that when hooked up to their small screens, these kids can go (or actually not go) for four days straight. It’s amazing. Finally, some silly soul will point out that there is a digital compass right there in the middle of the dashboard. Certainly, there is. There is a digital S, E, N, and W. You and I might think this stands for South, East, North, and West. Those sophomores think it’s a rating system for the drive ahead; S for smooth, E for easy, N for nasty, and I don’t know…W for wobbly? The cause of this navigational mishap was…the kid with the mouthful of metal braces who sat too close to the GPS receiver.
The wife says I already have a driverless car. Of course, she’s referring to my car whenever, you know, I’m driving it. Very funny. Will I ever own a driverless car for real someday? No way! I’m a crabby old guy. I drive my own car, thank you very much. Not only will I never own a driverless car, I will refuse to drive on any highway populated by other people’s driverless cars. I’m not going to trust my 2006 stick shift Chevy Aveo with a bunch of overgrown electric golf carts with silicon chips for brains. And yes, I do expect to still have my 2006 Chevy Aveo in 2025. It will just be getting broken in about that time. The muffler I had installed last week has a lifetime warranty. It cost me $238 at Midas, and you can betcha booty I’m not going to let that go to waste. I may have to buy a new set of tires for it, maybe get a brake job; then it’s good to go.
Tesla, Volkswagen, General Motors, even Google are developing driverless cars. I bet you didn’t even know Google made cars. Well they do, and if you want to verify, you can Google it of course (which that fact right there only goes to show the entire universe will be owned by one company someday). They spun off a business called Waymo, which is building proto-types of driverless vehicles. (I think that stands for Waymo’ crashups coming in the future.) Some are retro-fitted Toyotas, Chryslers, or whatevers. But Google also built their own from scratch. It looks like a big driving egg with a blue pimple on the roof. Each such Google-born driverless car has $150,000 worth of electronics equipment in it. Can you imagine? If I put $150,000 into my Aveo it would live forever! (It may live forever anyway. I’m sure my son will want to get his hands on that baby when I kick the bucket. Now he has a BMW. It’s time he took it up a notch.)
I confidently predict we are heading for nothing less than driverless Armageddon. Just imagine it’s the year 2025 and there are 50 million driverless cars on the road, all at the same time. They all rely on satellite GPS and computer chips. Let’s recall that computer chips are behind the fact that it now takes five minutes and fifty-three seconds to boot up my laptop every time I want to post to this blog. And what happens when your driving electric egg does the blue screen thing when you’re doing 90 mph on the Eisenhower Expressway? But that’s nothing! Wait until those GPS satellites and electronic car-brains get taken out all at once. Impossible you say? Absolutely not. I’m actually serious when I make this point. It could be anything from an outbreak of gigantic sunspots to a virus launched by those dirty Russkies. (Yeah I know, the Russians would never do stuff like that.) Whatever the cause, now you’ve got fifty million cars bouncing off each other and into the ditch at an average speed of 110 mph. (I’m basing that estimate on the speed of the clowns passing me on Fond du Lac Avenue every day.) (Sure I could pass them right back again, but my little Aveo doesn’t like to show off.)
A future with driverless cars? Allow me to extrapolate from the present. The other day I saw an ad on the TV machine that drives me nuts. In it, some bonehead sits in his big shiny pickup truck with his hands ostentatiously off the wheel while the truck automatically parallel parks itself. He smirks this big cocky smile at some admiring bystanders, apparently about squeezing that big behemoth into that little parking space. Dude! Wipe that self-satisfied smirk off your face! The g@dd@mn truck parked itself! You did absolutely nothing, you bonehead! (Am I being redundant? Sometimes once isn’t enough.) Is this the future of society? Are we going to go around bragging about our vehicles doing the crap we can’t do ourselves? Like, you know, even drive for god’s sake?
Not I, ladies and gentlemen. I will still be driving my 2006 Chevrolet Aveo, and parallel parking it every chance I get, all by myself.