herbie goes bananas!

car driving as a manual art, died on saturday in the mojave desert in nevada. not that this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. speeding back from galle, also on saturday, the lady driver ahead of me very calmly put on her left blinker and turned smoothly across the galle road to her right. then she shook her fist at me when i politely called out the error of her ways. it struck later me that this was a kind of inverse déjà vu.

for, at roughly the same time, 23 automated vehicles guided only by on board gps, lasers, cameras, infra red sensors and loads of computing power were racing each other in the desert at the other end of the earth for a usd 2 million prize offered by the us defense advanced research projects agency (presumably voldermort was not a committee member). the vehicles raced each other to the finish over the 240 km obstacle course and were truly automated in that absolutely no remote control was allowed. a souped up volkswagen won.

no driving. think about it.

(remember those quaint stickers on cars - “ no hand signals” ???)