Driverless Deliveries – The Weird Side of the Internet

Driverless Deliveries – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Driverless cars. I was talking about this with a cabbie, the strong, silent type. So silent, it was almost like he wasn’t even there.

Oh yeah…

I have a cabbie in my family. Driverless cars aren’t one of the topics that got bandied about on Thanksgiving to float atop the canned cranberry sauce. It’s his job, but more than that, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a dice rolled on the box of chocolates that is your cabbie when the cab rolls up. Is he friendly? Does he say a word?

I get that cabbies are competing with ride-sharing like Uber and Lyft, but at least they have people too. My car was in the shop, and I had to grab a couple of Ubers and I got the mix. I got one driver, quiet, but for the soft Indian music. Another guy told he his life story with his yellow ‘check engine’ light on.

Where the hell is the fun in a self-driving car? I guess if you’re one woman, it’s as good a place as any to give birth.

In San Francisco, an unidentified woman gave birth in a Waymo, the driverless “taxi” company under Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It detected “unusual activity,” and turned the microphones and cameras on and called 911. It got her to the hospital safely, and get this: the other passengers got home safely too.

The other passengers? Can you imagine being in a driverless car, sitting next to a pregnant woman who’s giving birth right there?

Did they charge her more for the extra passenger she ended the ride with? Was there a cleaning fee? I mean, people probably puke in those things, surely Waymo isn’t taking the cleaning cost on the chin.

Funny side story: one of those things made an illegal U-turn right in front of a cop, who, upon pulling it over, can’t give it a ticket. Bummer, right?

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