Who's Behind the Wheel? Nobody.

This is what Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neil had to say:

“The driverless car is coming. And we all should be glad it is.”

It’s quite obvious Dan has never been entertained by the occult classic film saga, “Terminator”.

In perspective, the Orwellians want us to purchase a sophisticated technologically advanced driverless vehicle that uses gasoline consuming internal combustion engines. Both of which have been obsolete for more then thirty years but the oil crime cartel would beg to differ. This is the definition of dichotomy. How about a nuclear powered driverless vehicle? Oh, they have one of those on planet Mars.

By DAN NEIL

The Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca is a 2.2-mile asphalt roller coaster plunging and soaring across California’s tawny Monterey highlands. The most famous section, the Corkscrew, requires drivers storming up a long hill to slam the brakes and take a hard left into what seems to be thin air. The car goes momentarily weightless, and when the track materializes beneath you—always a pleasant surprise—it’s going downhill like a ski jump—and, oh yeah, heading hard right.

This is one of several blind corners at Laguna Seca requiring drivers to commit to a turn long before they can actually see where they’re going. If you wait to see the corner before you turn in for it, you’ll wind up in Monterey.

As the automotive critic for The Wall Street Journal, I’ve been to Laguna Seca many times testing high-performance cars, and on this particular day in June 2011, I was driving brilliantly. I’d tamed the shrewish Corkscrew, unbent the Andretti hairpin. Like a Stradivarius pawed by Heifetz, so too the BMW in my hands.

Except that I wasn’t really driving. While I was indeed in the driver’s seat, my hands and feet were weirdly unoccupied.

The car was driving itself, digitally duplicating a lap driven earlier by a professional driver—a man now sitting on the pit wall, watching the car and me come and go. All I had to do was sit there, with the car dancing on the edge of control under me, manfully freaking out.

BMW’s TrackTrainer—an experimental 330i sedan bristling with machine-vision equipment—uses GPS, track maps and telemetry recorded during a professional driver’s model lap to negotiate a racecourse. Drivers-in-training can receive “haptic” feedback—a buzzing sensation on the right or left side of the seat bolsters—and visual cues that guide them through the turns, like the preferred-line graphic superimposed in a video driving game. Or, the car can take over the wheel, gas and brakes altogether, re-creating the pro’s lap, almost to the last inch of asphalt. Then it can do it again, exactly, beautifully.

Damn. I can accept the notion of autonomous cars as our dronish helpmates, and I certainly welcome the technology’s promise to impose order on our dangerous, uncoordinated, inefficient traffic system. Hail ants.

Redirect to:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443524904577651552635911824.html#articleTabs%3Darticle