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"The in-car voice would talk to you in an attempt to improve the state of your mood."

Jones said the technology would not act as a counselor to solve complex issues, but it would be more like a "best friend" who could cheer you up at the end of a long day.

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It would also be able to detect whether the driver was drowsy by identifying signs such as quiet, flat speech, and could then trigger an alarm to rouse the driver.

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So you're just cruising along, enjoying your drive down the highway, quiet and happy, and suddenly the alarm starts going off because you've been quiet for too long!?

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"The in-car voice would talk to you in an attempt to improve the state of your mood."

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[ 07 April 2005: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]

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He said the car would be able to detect, for example, if the driver was stressed about running late and tell them the best possible route.

"It would give certain information that would help. If they were in a hurry, the car would work out the safer, faster route instead of, perhaps, a scenic route," he said.

"The in-car voice would talk to you in an attempt to improve the state of your mood."

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"This is the next generation of car, which can detect what mood you are in."

He said research showed that a driver's emotional state affected how well they drove: If they were happy, they drove well and if they were sad, they tended to drive worse.

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Is that so?! What about when they are angry?

I can see myself and half my family driving one of these cars, and the exchange:

"Easy on the brakes, you need to calm down."

"Shut the phuk up you too, you sack of recycled beer cans."

"Easy, calm, listen to some music,"

"good idea, I crank up the tunes, put the pedal to the metal and laugh because I drown you out!"

At that point, as I laugh, I smash into the back of the slow moving truck.

My Mother the Car may very well be known as the most notorious short-lived sitcom of all time and it's solely due to it's premise, a talking car. The series was first seen in September of 1965 on NBC and joined the ranks of other "fantasy" driven sitcoms of the time, including Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan's Island, and Mister Ed, to name a few.

The pilot episode introduces us to the world of Dave Crabtree. Dave is your ordinary family man, married to wife Barbara and they have two children, Randy and Cindy. However, it's when he purchases a 1928 Porter, that he discovers that another family member is living with him, his deceased mother. It seems Dave Crabtree's mother has been reincarnated as a car. The voice of Dave's mother was provided by actress Ann Sothern and the only person the car would talk to was Dave.

Also in the cast was Captain Mancini. Mancini was a car collector who was always trying to find a way to purchase the Porter. Despite being quite unique, and low ratings, NBC dropped the series in the fall of 1966.

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Originally posted by Igor the Miserable:
When peak oil hits, I wonder if the car will cough up a death rattle or will it just wimper?

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Kunstler
explains things better than I can:

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The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the US automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

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Neither, it'll be converted to run on hydrogen and/or electricity.

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