UnNews:Ford building self-woman-driving car
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Ford building self-woman-driving car |
18 August 2016
DETROIT, Michigan -- Ford Motor Company has bought a majority stake in Elle Magazine.
Analysts see this, after Ford's purchase of robotic vision companies such as Velodyne, GPS leader Civil Maps, and pioneers in managing an activity with no human brain power recruited from the Donald Trump campaign, as a key acquisition to complete the fully driverless car.
Ford engineers, whose previous high-water mark in automation was a CHECK ENGINE
light that comes on from merely creeping over a speed bump, wrestled with a final design challenge: After buying a car with a single pushbutton instead of a steering wheel, shift lever, and foot pedals, more than half the world's drivers will want a dashboard switch with which to set the self-driving car to emulate a woman driver.
The "self-woman-driving car" will need artificial intelligence to let it:
- Quickly decelerate from 70 mph to about 5 mph whenever there is an accident on the other side of an expressway, and the chance to catch a glimpse of limbless bodies and spurting blood.
- Decelerate almost as quickly when passing a parked police cruiser. Although the driverless car will presumably know all the rules of the road, it will be expected to emulate a driver who feels guilty because she knows none of them.
- Violate all the rules of the road anyway, whenever within 3 weeks of Christmas, in order to imitate a self-righteous woman driver shopping for presents for the children. This mode will include a special Attack Mode that can be enabled when competing for empty parking spaces near malls.
- Abruptly turn down a side street, out of the fast lane, on seeing a store window advertising a clearance sale.
- Veer into an adjacent lane or fail to move when the light turns green because the automated driver is texting (or, where that is illegal, looking in the vanity mirror and touching up the mascara or blush).
The switch will operate correctly only 90% of the time. In a nod to political correctness worthy of any Ford Annual Report to Shareholders, the other 10% of the time, the car will operate as a male driver who self-identifies as a woman but nevertheless does know how to drive.
Sources[edit]
- JoAnn Muller "Meet the Four Start-ups Helping Ford Develop a Robot Taxi". Forbes, August 18, 2016