If I’m going to have to eat crow, I would at least like it to taste good. This is the blog I thought I’d never have to write, but once again I was wrong...again. I’ve been saying for years that pure electric vehicles won’t be fun to drive and that autonomous vehicles were at least 10 to 15 years away. Wrong on both counts.
I’ll start with the electric cars remark: I assumed they’d have a certain air about them, smooth, quiet and reasonable quick but I totally missed that they be so dang fast. I’m talking "pin you in your seat" fast. No drama, no spinning tires and smoke...just pure acceleration. There is far less concern about range as most most models have at least 250 miles and some going as far 400 miles. Another unexpected delight is how they make you a better driver. The instrument panel lights up with all kinds of details in regards to how you’re doing as a driver and before long you're working to improve your power use and clean up your jack-rabbit starts (as much fun as they are). It’s a little bit like having your mother-in-law in the dashboard (not fair), it really forces you to pay attention and the reward is you do a better job as a driver.
Okay, now about autonomous vehicles. In my defense, just a few years back I was testing a new vehicle at a major automotive manufacturer’s proving grounds and was warned if I spotted an autonomous test vehicle on course to not pass it too fast or too close for fear I might spoke it — spoke it? That said, to me that living in the real world was not what these vehicles were even close to ready for. Adding to that, there has been a number of crashes where the autonomous vehicle did as it wanted...not what was needed. So I concluded that merging such a vehicle into today's traffic streams was still some time away. Well, silly me. It seems the millions of dollars that manufacturers have been spending to develop the required sensors to make these vehicles function has been paying off and the proof-of-progress has been hiding in plain sight.
There are options on a lot of today’s new cars that are all a part of what is required to make vehicles drive themselves: lane keeper, GPS, auto cruise control, radar controlled panic stopping, and on and on. Now every car Tesla makes are all but ready to be fully autonomous; all they need is the law stating they’re legal and their owners will be able to simply download the final data and they’ll be good to go.
So, I blew it; That’s the bad news. The good news is it appears that electric cars will be cool, assuming there is enough electrical power in each city to charge them. Also, fully autonomous vehicles will be hitting the roads (I sure hope that wasn’t a bad choice of words) real soon. I Hope they come with really good cup holders.
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