Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Self-Driving Vehicles

Here’s another idea that won’t make it to the highway any time soon.  If the manufacturers bribe our elected officials enough, they may push the auto manufacturers to offer this unnecessary feature.

What is needed is self-driving trains.  These things crash all the time.  Another would be self-driving public transit; their operators are overpaid and get pensions.  We could navigate around self-driving public transit buses on the roads and self-driving commuter trains, but self-driving 18 wheel semis on the highways is an entirely different matter, not to mention self-driving school buses….bye kids. 

I am all for exporting oil and natural gas via pipelines and freight trains transporting pods and big heavy stuff from the plants to the cities, but self-driving semi pile-ups would not unclog the highways and self-driving deliveries would need robots to unload them. And if you can do math, you will see that the capital investment for that is much more than paying over-qualified, under-paid hired labor that comes equipped with a brain.

I’m all for automation, but I haven’t heard anybody explain how big box goods find their way out of the self-driving truck and get put into the right bin in the back of the supermarket.

Hackers will be opening the doors to supermarket warehouses all over the country in the dead of night with the camera and alarm systems disabled.


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

1 comment:

Priscilla King said...

Washington's Metrorail trains *are* and have been self-driving. The human in the conductor's compartment is there just for security...mainly the passengers' emotional security, although Metro Spokesman Lisa Farbstein used to claim the human could override the self-driving program if necessary.

That's why self-driving vehicles scare me.