Many members of Congress lost their chance to test a driverless car on Tuesday after Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton decided to hit the car’s kill switch, according to NBC Washington.
Carnegie Mellon scientists brought the driverless car prototype to Washington, D.C. so that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee could test drive the vehicle.
Yet, after just a few hours, Holmes-Norton brought the fun to an end before she even got to take the car for a spin as the demonstrator said, “No, no, no!”
Watch the video via NBC Washington:
Keep your hands to yourself. Even a school child knows that. What on earth possessed her to do that?
It isn’t a very robust system if pressing the “kill” switch crashes the system to the point that it can’t be brought up in reasonable time. Reasonable time is measured in seconds, not hours or days.
This is definitely not ready for real roads. Let’s hope Google’s cars are better set.
Obviously she is funded by the Taxi cab commission. No we cannot have driverless cars!
Of course it’s not - this is a prototype. While there would almost certainly be an e-stop button in a production model, there are any number of reasons why a prototype couldn’t be brought back online immediately after emergency shutdown.
Want to make sure people DO press a button?
Make it a big red button and put the words “DO NOT PRESS” under it.