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I don't ever want to drive a car that's smarter than I am.
("Too late, buster," you're saying to yourself.)
They call them "autonomous" cars.
"Autonomous" is a word from the Latin: "auto," meaning "car," and "mous," meaning "mouse," or literally, "mouse car." I'm not sure why "mouse car" means a car that drives itself, but, anyway, that's what an autonomous car does.
We bought a used 2018 Toyota RAV4 last year for my wife and then I wrecked it in a chain-reaction crash last September approaching the Squirrel Hill Tunnels in heavy traffic.
There are degrees of vehicle autonomy. Honey's car was not autonomous enough know that some idiot four vehicles ahead of us had slammed on his brakes at 65 miles per hour, and it wasn't autonomous enough to brake quicker than I did to avoid the crash.
The airbags did not deploy and we weren't hurt, but Honey's car sustained heavy front-end damage, and the insurance company paid $11,000 to repair instead of totaling it, which is what we had hoped for. Anyway, it is all fixed and good as new, including its rudimentary autonomous features, which are mainly warnings. Some are helpful and some simply annoying.
THE ONE THAT really bugs me is the lane departure feature.
If I drift over the center or edge lines on the highway without signaling, a camera somewhere on the car sees it and the car beeps at me. If I drift over four or five times in a short time span, a little picture of a coffee cup appears on the dashboard screen with the message "Please take a rest."
"Don't you know this is West Virginia, you stupid car?" I yell at it when it keeps beeping as I drive up a narrow road winding up a hollow where it's impossible not to keep crossing the lines.
I found a solution to that problem one day driving on Paradise Road, which snakes along a creek in an Ohio River Valley ravine coming out of Industry, Pa. If I straddle the center line the whole way it only beeps once.
The car doesn't beep at me if I use the turn signal. Honey scolds me if I don't use a turn signal every time I change lanes on a four-lane. She says I should get in the habit of using turn signals. I say I do use my turn signals, but may not when there's no other car in sight, or if I have to change lanes quickly in heavy traffic.
I do like the proximity alarm beep that warns of a person or car behind me when the car is backing up, and I like the blind spot warning that shows up on rearview side mirrors.
I'd probably like the automatic braking feature, too, though I don't think it would have prevented our crash. I'm not sure how I feel about "lane assist," which uses steering and/or braking to gently "nudge" you back into your lane if you drift out of it. There can be very good reasons for drifting out of your lane, like when an eighteen-wheeler drifts into yours.
I do kind of like the adaptive cruise control, which uses radar to keep you from mindlessly running into the car ahead, and prevents tailgating, too.
THE FULLY AUTONOMOUS cars are the ones that scare me.
Who isn't frightened by news stories like the two men killed when their self-driving Tesla car self-drove them into a tree? When some beardless wunderkinds were writing the computer code for the Tesla autopilot algorithm, how did they forget to include the ones and zeroes that tell the car "don't drive into a tree?"
Since the men purposely chose to try out the autopilot feature, and neither one was found behind the steering wheel, I would consider cause of death as "suicide."
Autopilot cars in their current state of development are supposed to have an alert driver behind the wheel to take control if, for instance, the car perceives the white side of a tractor-trailer as open road, as happened in one fatality.
That's kind of funny because it turns the equation 180 degrees: the driver assisting the car instead of the car assisting the driver. And we've all seen the videos of drivers asleep at the wheel of a driverless car, cruising peacefully down the highway.
The auto companies say autonomous cars are statistically much safer, but if I get killed in a car crash, I'd like to have a human being to blame, not an algorithm.