Self-Driving Cars and the Car Chases of the Future

I’ve seen a lot of car commercials lately.  Not because I’m in the market for a new car or anything.  It’s just that car manufacturers tend to advertise a lot during sporting events and the past two weekends and this upcoming weekend encompass perhaps America’s most exciting extended sporting event in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  Who out there DIDN’T fill out a bracket?

So, this last weekend, I was watching some 11 seed screw up my bracket while my wife, Kelly, was knitting sweaters for homeless penguins, when a commercial for the Mercedes E Class Sedan came on.  In addition to being a pretty sleek car for an economic group that I definitely don’t belong to, it features “sudden stop,” or essentially slowing down and stopping itself.

My wife asked innocently enough, “What if I don’t want it to stop?”  This, of course, naturally led to a discussion of any number of scenarios in which one would want to crash their car into things, like smashing through chain linked fences while fleeing hordes of zombies.  How many countless more would be dead on The Walking Dead if the vehicles just stopped themselves before barreling over walkers or through a barricade?

By extrapolation, what happens to the action film standard car chase when cars begin stopping themselves or even driving themselves? 

It’s hard enough to imagine those great classic car chases of the past, like in Bullitt (1968) or in The French Connection (1971), if Steve McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback on the high end, or Popeye Doyle’s more pedestrian 1971 Pontiac LeMans, were equipped with air bags. 

That big truck with the “Drive Carefully” sign clips our detective hero. BOOM.  Air bag deploys.  Chase over.

With emerging car technology, no kid today will ever dream of being as cool as Steve McQueen, for two reasons.  One:  There are no actors today as cool as Steve McQueen.  Two:  No one will ever be able to exceed the speed limit, run a light, swerve through an intersection, much less run into anything, inside the city limits of San Francisco. 

Real car drivers’ gain may be the movies’ loss.