Bring on the Cars That Drive Themselves [1]
While driving from San Antonio to Houston this week, I came up on two cars that seemed to be traveling slower than the rest of us, and they were swerving from their lane over into mine. Usually when I run up on someone who acts like they might be drunk I speed up and go around them so that they don’t cause a problem. This was unusual since there were two cars traveling almost in a caravan down I-10.
As I sped up and started by them, I noted a couple of things. The driver of the first car was texting at 75 miles per hour and not exactly looking at the road. That was scary enough but as I passed the second car, I saw something that looked like a video on a smartphone in the hands of the driver. He was holding the phone against the steering wheel, watching the phone, and trying to stay in his lane. He was not doing a very good job of driving.
That reinforces my call for driverless cars. It is clear that we need them sooner rather than later.
When I checked my email, I noticed an article from Dick Pelletier on his blog site Positive Futurist [9]. He says that by 2020 we should have those cars in the fleet. That will be a welcome change to those of us who have to drive on the roads with multitasking highway drivers.