No Accidents!

GM and Segway (yes, the scooterific people) are hooking up to make a vehicle that will change the way you putter around Manhattan.  Check out the picture first.  Awesome (sarcasm).  Anyways, I was mildly amused that, after introducing the Hummer to the world and making cash off of gigantic SUVs for years, GM’s new strategy is to put you into a brand new shiny, two-wheeled shopping cart.  So I started reading the accompanying artiCAL and was stopped in my tracks.

Larry Burns, GM’s vice president of research and development, and strategic planning, said the project is part of Detroit-based GM’s effort to remake itself as a purveyor of fuel-efficient vehicles. If Hummer took GM to the large-vehicle extreme, Burns said, the PUMA takes GM to the other.

Ideally, the vehicles would also be part of a communications network that through the use of transponder and GPS technology would allow them to drive themselves. The vehicles would automatically avoid obstacles such as pedestrians and other cars and therefore never crash, Burns said.

Well, I’m glad they’ll never crash. Even without getting into the particulars of Murhpy’s Law that is an asinine statement.  The idea that if we wrap a shopping cart with enough wi-fi that it will never hit anything is pretty lunatic territory, and that’s not even getting into misusing your shopping cart through drunkenness, etc.

On this one, I’m firmly in the A2K camp.