How big a leap is it from Google’s self driving car to a terrestrial cruise missile? Do we want cruise missiles to be licensed to the general public? Will terrorists be big customers?
What is Google thinking? Why hasn’t the Department of Transportation weighed in on this? What problem does a driverless vehicle solve? What problems does it create?
As for doing anything to abate climate change, the car is electric, its batteries charged from the grid. Two thirds of power on the grid is provided by fossil fuel power plants with thermal efficiencies ranging from thirty to thirty-eight per cent. Overall efficiency of the electric cars will be in the mid-twenties, far below the forty percent efficiency common for modern motor cars. So much for abatement of climate change.
Advancement of technology is fun and often profitable. But too often it creates problems rather than solving them, some of them deadly.
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