Reining in progress

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Much is being said about self-driving cars. In fact, the government is about to issue policy on them, and knowing how the government works, that can’t end well.

There are a lot of unanswered questions: In a game of chicken, who is more likely to win — a driverless car or one with an adolescent behind the wheel? If someone in a conventional vehicle cuts off a driverless car, how will the driverless car flip off the driver of the conventional car? Or will the driverless car be equipped with special “get back at you” devices we don’t know about yet?

Is the goal to do away with regular cars and pickup trucks and become a nation of passengers in cars that have all the control? What will happen to aimless Sunday afternoon drives with no particular destination in mind? What will we do with all those unemployed driver’s ed teachers? What will backyard mechanics tinker on?

I’m not so sure about driverless cars. When I was in elementary school, the Junior Scholastic magazine — or was it the Weekly Reader? — predicted flying cars and jet packs. In fact, if the magazines had predicted correctly, we’d all have them by now. Imagine flying around a traffic jam in your flying car. Or strapping on a jet pack and just zooming off to a distant city in a matter of minutes.

In fact, I’m really disappointed that no one has perfected the flying cars by now. We Baby Boomers were promised those, and we feel cheated. Driverless cars? Phooey! Give us a car that can fly! Just imagine the chaos we could cause with that; rush hour would take on a whole new meaning.

If scientists want to do something useful and keeping within the magical promises of the Weekly Reader, come up with something more practical. I’d love to see a trash can that wheels itself out to the curb on pickup day. All week long it sits in the garage or just outside the back door for easy loading, and then on pickup day its motor kicks in and it scoots over to curb where the trash truck unloads it and then it ambles on back to start over again.

We have self-propelled vacuum cleaners. Why not a self-propelled cart that collects the mail from the mailbox? And is equipped with sensors that will put mail in to be collected and put up the red flag alerting the postal carrier? That would be so handy on snowy or rainy days.

I’ve heard there’s talk about programmable shopping carts; the shopper keys in what’s on the grocery list and turns the cart loose. Imagine the money you could save from impulse purchases. But if you forgot to put an item on the list, you’re pretty much out of luck. That idea needs work.

I might be inclined to consider a driverless car if it had self-cleaning features, if it could hover over an icy road instead of sliding on it, or if it would load its own trunk after the programmable shopping cart finished at the grocery store.

But on the whole, I’d rather have a jet pack.