Take the Fun Out of Driving

One of the things I enjoy about driving is the fact that I'm driving. I'm not sure why but there's just something inherently satisfying about the experience. Much of it has to do with the make and model I selected. After all, their entire marketing campaign emphasizes the pleasure of driving it in a simple four word slogan.

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.