Tuesday, December 13, 2016

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?


Honda engineers are developing an electric vehicle called the NeuV, which will have an interesting feature aside from being ugly and too small to dent a Beetle.

A system of cameras and sensors inside the NeuV will "read" the driver and then engage him or her in conversation in a manner appropriate to the emotional cues the system perceives. As a person drives the car more, then system will get better and better at reading the emotions and driver and car will "grow up" together.

There are no plans as yet to make the NeuV a self-driving car, which is probably as wise a move as could happen in the middle of this rather loopy idea. Sports fans going home in their NeuVs after a bad loss could suddenly find their cars zooming towards bridge abutments -- "zooming" probably being a relative term here. Inebriated people in a NeuV cockpit could "infect" the car with their behavior, leading to a law-enforcement conundrum: The person in the car might have been drunk but wasn't actually driving. So we could see a wave of drunk tank remodeling as NeuV-friendly cells are constructed while the miscreant buggies both charge and sober up.

Since the cars will be speaking with their drivers, they will probably require different language modules. NeuVs sold in the South would definitely need to know how to say, "No, I will not make a buzzing sound so your friends will think I'm a John Deere mower. You're in a NeuV. Deal with it." NeuV's sold in New York, however, will probably need their language software to have the Carlin app to better interact with their own drivers as well as drivers in nearby cars.

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