Word: jeep
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...Rait is on a road to nowhere, and he's none too happy about it. Jouncing along in a Jeep Cherokee through the Southwest wilderness, he points with disgust at the freshly dug track he's following. It meanders into a streambed, emerges from the other side and then stops abruptly. In just one afternoon Rait, an environmentalist with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, will find several more such dead-end trails, ranging from a mere quarter mile to a few miles long. Not one of them goes anywhere at all. "They're cutting roads all over the place...
...Grand Cherokee wends its lazy way along the gently curving road, cruising at 25 m.p.h. through rural Michigan's autumnal landscape of gold-and-orange-dappled trees. I'm reclining in the rear of the car with Jeff Zyburt, a Chrysler project manager. As we chat, the Jeep changes lanes from smooth asphalt to rough cobblestone, which sets us passengers bouncing around in the back seat...
...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...
...margin of safety. But margins of safety are in the eye of the beholder, as Chrysler's Zyburt and I discover about halfway around one of the track's cobblestone lanes. "This is where it gets rough on our test drivers," he warns me, just as, on cue, the Jeep slams to a halt, throwing us painfully against our seat belts. "Oops," Zyburt says sheepishly. He has accidentally bumped into the system-override "kill'' button set in the back seat. If this had been a real smartway, we might have found ourselves at the business end of a multicar pileup...
...Molitor's loyalty is somewhat more mystifying. In 1986 Alex was dating schoolmate Molitor; it was her family's Jeep he was driving the night of the alleged rape. Although he returned from his exile with a Swedish woman, Elisabet Jansson, whom he described as his fiance, Jansson is gone and Kelly and Molitor are again romantically involved. Courtroom observers can be heard whispering, "What does she see in him?" They might well wonder: just before the trial the couple was in a car wreck, in Amy's car. Kelly, out on bond and late for his curfew, overturned...