Word: driver
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...idea is always the same. Proponents imagine a morning someday in the next century when you and your smart car pull out of the garage, drive down local roads in the conventional manner and head for the "smartway." There you will merge into the auto lanes, activate your robo-driver and relax. The car will hurtle along at high speed--perhaps up to 140 m.p.h.--only a few feet from the cars in front and behind but protected by collision-avoidance radar and automatic brakes, with guidance coils on either side steering it down the center of the lane...
...steering the car? Nobody. In the front, where the driver should be, is a hulking metal contraption that looks like an out-of-place engine part. It is bolted to the Jeep's brake pedal, accelerator and steering wheel. Thick cables connect it to the computer that occupies the passenger seat. This vehicle is, essentially, a Jeep-shaped robot...
What happens when a deer jumps onto the smartway? What if a driver in the auto lane decides to step on the brakes? What if a computer crashes? Do all the cars follow suit? And then whom do you sue--the driver, the carmaker or the programmer? "With all that can go wrong," asked Chrysler chairman Robert Eaton in a speech in Dearborn, Michigan, last week, expressing some of the industry's concerns, "will we all spend the rest of our lives in court...
...drive ourselves to work indefinitely, it is likely that we'll be supported by an array of sophisticated gadgetry that would dazzle Henry Ford. One antidrowsiness system developed by Nissan, for instance, uses a video camera mounted on the instrument panel to count the frequency and duration of the driver's blinks to determine if he or she is getting dangerously sleepy. To rouse a dozing driver, the system sounds an electronic beeper while a disembodied female voice advises the driver to "please take a rest." Meanwhile, a blast of lemon-and-menthol-scented odorizer fills the air. Throw...
Capps learned something in his 1994 run against Andrea Seastrand: campaigning helps. The University of California at Santa Barbara religious-studies chairman continued to teach during that race and lost by just 1,563 votes. This year he was sent to the hospital by a drunk driver. But the unflappable Capps is making the election a referendum on Newt Gingrich and sees his own political naivete as a plus...