Do you like your car?
How much do you like your car?
Would you potentially drive your car toward a child to prove that your car is the best, safest car on the market?
If the answer is no, you have successfully passed the “normal person” test that Whole Mars Catalog, a “24 hour EV news channel” that also claims to be a “part shitty stand up comedy routine” has failed. You see, for the past day or two, WMC (I am not going to type their name out again) has been fighting a battle against reports that the radar-less electric vehicle the Tesla Model Y is failing to notice child-sized objects during its autonomous “Full Self-Driving” mode.
And when I say “fighting a battle,” I mean “attempting to create a scenario in which somebody driving a Tesla drives their Tesla toward a child. It all began with a simple request: does anybody have a child in the Bay Area they wouldn’t mind running in front of WMC’s car?
One might believe that this was satire — a way of mocking equally insane and inane zealotry of Elon Musk’s fanboys — if it weren’t for how many times he has doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on the fact that not only is he serious that he needs to try and run over a child, but that in attempting to do so his beliefs will be edified. He will be proven right.
If you’re wondering what point he’s attempting to prove, it’s because the point itself is incredibly murky. From what I can tell, WMC is attempting to prove that yes, a Tesla using Full Self-Driving Mode — a mode that the California DMV has said makes misleading claims — will stop in the event it sees a child. To do this, WMC intends to have the father or mother of the child let the child go in front of the car, and at that point, I assume, the parent will then turn on Full Self-Driving Mode, and the car will then drive toward the child and, God willing, stop.
As a parent, and as a human being, my general perspective on the location of children vis a vis a moving vehicle is either “inside or otherwise not close to it.” The reason is that these vehicles, even going at relatively low speeds, can easily hurt or kill a person (let alone a child) because they are fast-moving contraptions made of metal. If I had to prove a point, I would not choose to do so in this manner, regardless of how much I liked my car or the CEO of a car company.
WMC’s point appears to be that by proving that Full Self-Driving will disengage…
