It wouldn't matter a whole lot if I was driving something less fun. I enjoyed driving my 1964 MGB and my beat-up Toyota Corolla for which I paid about $550 back in the 80s.
But leave it to General Motors to come up with an idea to toss all my pleasure aside. If this comes to fruition, and I could see benefits of it in certain areas, the joy of motoring will be equal to driving those amusement park cars that were guided by a track. It was fun to steer them but there was no point.
Within a decade, General Motors thinks it will have the ultimate solution to the growing problem of distracted drivers: a car that can do the driving itself.
G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, plans to unveil a prototype of a self-driving Chevrolet Tahoe sport-utility vehicle developed with the help of Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show. The vehicle, nicknamed “Boss,” is capable of handling itself in a controlled setting like the parking lot at the Las Vegas Convention Center where G.M. is showing it off this week, but not on a regular street with obstacles like pedestrians.
The automaker expects driverless vehicle technology to be ready for testing by 2015 and in vehicles that it sells by 2018, a G.M. spokesman, Scott Fosgard, said on Sunday.
[...]
G.M. hopes that the prospect of a driverless car will make the company, which has struggled to shed its image as a lumbering industrial-age behemoth, appear more cutting-edge.
Emphasis on the word appear. Using a Tahoe to demonstrate this probably blows away the notion of "cutting-edge" right there. This is one major reason why GM is having problems.
The Orgasmatron was a cutting-edge idea but that doesn't mean I want to use it in lieu of actual sex.
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