How Autonomous Cars Will Transform Everyday Life
Meat Loaf’s classic song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” will soon seem downright prehistoric—a tune from back when people had to sneak sex in parked cars. In the age of autonomous vehicles, experts are worried that we’ll be having all kinds of sex in moving cars. Randy teens might order a driverless Uber SUV with tinted windows for a spin around town. An office worker could take full advantage of the long morning commute with the spouse—or with the neighbor’s spouse. We can only hope Daimler-AG anticipated this development when in 2014 it registered a trademark for a driverless auto service it calls—kid you not—Car2come. (Perhaps they should’ve had a native English speaker in the room at the time?)
Car culture is whooshing a “strategic inflection point.” The autonomous-car movement is accelerating faster than a Tesla in Easter Egg mode. In recent weeks, Jaguar Land Rover $25 million in Lyft so JLR can test its autonomous cars on Lyft’s ride-hailing service. Honda, which had lagged in driverless tech, unveiled ambitious to make cars by 2020 that can drive themselves on highways. U.K.-based auto parts maker Delphi and French transport company Transdev said they will jointly start "driverless, on-demand mobility" on roads in France.
