I'll wait for the Bing car. Sure it doesn't go as many places, but it has a pretty photo of a sunset on the dash.

Butchers hate him!

5 Things You Should Know About Human Flesh

aww look at his tiny penis

An aside: holy shit balls it absolutely sucks to have your vehicle stolen. May 15th I was debt-free, $1000 in the black on my bank account, and making plans to spend a little money and make my living situation more comfortable. Today, I am broke, $1500 in debt to the bank, considering selling stuff to continue to eat, and still going to be waiting for another two weeks before I have a vehicle to drive.

I mean, I can almost understand stealing a vehicle if your target has full coverage insurance and you need to feed a drug addiction, because an addiction is a monstrous thing, but to steal it just to go joyriding, and when you're done, drain the oil and deliberately trash the engine, then tow it back to the parking space it was stolen from... why? Just why? What did you get out of a wanton act of destruction like that?

At least they were arrested for it.

Some people like to destroy things.

They had it towed back?

They towed it themselves. And were arrested in the process.

I guess next time they won't tow it back.

Maybe they've learned something from this.

Some people are just shits.

No mention that it's electric. Boogie-woogie-woogie.

If only it didn't have a koala face...

i thought we would have johnny cabs first!

I'm all for self-driving cars, but I'd like one with a manual option. I find driving to be quite mentally relaxing if I'm in the right mood, and wouldn't want to have to keep a second car around for that option.

Also a 25mph car would take me forever to get to the places I actually drive to, but I realize it's a prototype.

I can't wait for them to be mainstream not so much for myself, but because I want to force everyone else on the road to use them.

The should take lessons from Doc Brown:

The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

On one hand, this is amazing and I want to be a part of this.

On the other, watching an SUV that ran a red light come barreling towards you and you can do naught but hit a little button is terrifying.

The obvious solution is to mount a laser powerful enough to vaporize any meatbag piloted death jalopy that strays too close.

A laser that powerful would have to carry an energy source with enough power to light up a small city for a few hours, and be able to discharge it in a fraction of a second. Would you really want to ride around with a small nuclear bomb in your car?

(This is why my kids hate watching Batman/Star Wars/anything with energy weapons with me. I'm a buzzkill. But at least I wait until after the movie to comment on these things...)

Good point. Small rocket launchers would be safer.

I made this commentary one afternoon to my son regarding light sabers. Liam Neeson uses his to cut through a foot of steel. Based on how much energy is needed to heat steel from room temperature to vaporizing, the energy contained in that little flashlight-sized gizmo has to be enough to flatten a large area if it discharged all at once. I don't think I'd want to carry that around on my ass, much less take the chance of a blaster shot or a swipe from another light saber rupturing it.

Quoth my son: "God damn it, Dad, it's just a movie!"

Oh man! At this rate, these will be commercially available by the time I'll need one!

Huge advancements in robotics here, which begs the question: Does this in anyway increase my chances of having sex with a Megan Fox Android in my lifetime?

If you buy a driverless car and name it Megan Fox, sure.

Also, not to be pedantic, but make sure you get a gynoid or you'll be very disappointed.

I could make a joke about Johnny Cabs and hacks and Bing and the BSOD having an entirely new meaning, but I really wanted to say that I envision a future where almost no one has a license to drive a car manually because it would be considered too dangerous. Very few people would own a car at all, merely calling for one when needed. A driver's license would be like a pilot's license today, given after specialized training and for specific purposes.

But in my (anti)utopian future the soccer mom's car would also be driverless. If something went wrong the cars would just stop. I think many people have a reaction to this similar to the way people feel about commercial air travel. It's much safer but they are uncomfortable because they have no control.

That was supposed to be a reply to Abdul Alhazred. Also can somebody tell me why I always get logged off after I make a post? I set it to keep me logged in until I log out.

Disable Sensible Facial. It's not compatible with the new site.

Try clearing your cookies, too.

And update Shockwave.

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Or constructing additional pylons?

The difference is that in a plane (or a bus or a train) you have a human at the controls, not a computer. Being something of a pessimist, I always look at it as planning for the worst and hoping for the best. I like to have an ultimate safety system that's not tied into the electronics.

In engineering school one of the profs, a former GM guy, told us how there was a movement toward going to completely electronic systems in cars. The steering would be controlled by servos tied into sensors on the steering wheel, the brakes would be electronic and so on. The thought scared the shit out of me. I know a man who got locked into his Corvette because the door latches were electronic and the computer locked up on him. I know about it because I was the guy who got him out of there. It was a 90 degree plus day in Virginia, and he was in bad shape when I got him out. After I used his key to manually unlock the door, at which point his key fob began to work again, along with the rest of the systems.

But I suppose that if these driverless cars are going less than 25 mph on separate roadways, there would be a limit to how much trouble they could get into...

Some trains in Japan operate without a conductor.

I dunno, man. If the system fries and does something bad. I think I would really want an emergency override to a steering wheel mechanically connected to the tires and a brake pedal with hydraulics directly to the brakes.

I've been in a "driverless car" before that drove me around Masdar in Abu Dhabi and it was very cool, but that was on a closed track without SUVs driven by soccer moms jacked up on lattes.

They will next add manual controls and then test first in California, which needs it the most.

I prefer we keep the squirrels for now