Bump

Yesterday was the kind of day that just won’t quit. Any time I ride home from work with my phone beeping and buzzing the entire way, I know it’s going to be a long night. It was.

What I need, preferably by the time you read this, is a car that could drive me to work. Yes, it’s true. Despite working in Portland and riding my bike to work every day, I haven’t come to hate cars yet. It’s just that driving mine is a huge pain in the ass.

Sure, my car isn’t exactly indicative of most automobiles these day. I can’t get in the driver’s door any more, so I climb in the passenger’s side. And the dry erase board that’s been my rear passenger side window since the day I left Pennsylvania keeps heating up in the direct sunlight and sliding slowly down the side of the car, leaving a disgusting trail of Gorilla Tape glue everywhere. My wife and I have decided it’s time to donate the poor Outback to public radio–the automotive equivalent of taking it to a nice farm update where it can play outside all the time, in the fresh air, with the beloved Toyota Forerunner I’d donated half a dozen years ago.

But I hate driving it. It seems to take me longer to make the 12-mile trip to work in the car than it does on the bike. Maybe that’s an illusion, but, given the traffic, I doubt it–and even if it is, I’m happy to live that delusion. The bike’s faster.

I also feel strung out when I arrive at work in the car. Awkward, too, as if I’d worn clown shoes to work. I’m self-conscious trying to park it. That’s partially because it makes horrible screeching noises due to what I suspect is a dragging rotor or bad wheel bearing, even though I’d just had those checked at two separate places and was told both bearings and brakes are “good.” Maybe that’s why it gets like seven miles per gallon these days.

On my bike, I’d never tolerate a brake dragging like that, but in the car, you just roll up the window and screech away, driving to work with the brakes on and getting single-digit gas mileage.

Now, if I had a new car–one that drove itself and/or talked to me the whole way? That’d be an entirely different story.

According to Dara Kerr at CNET, if I were in Michigan, I might be able to arrange that.

While Google’s (nightmarish) self-driving cars are still a ways away (I hope), the “smartcars” being tested in Michigan by the Department of Transportation are simply connected to a network. This means two potentially amazing things:

First, WiFi cars equipped with fancy GPS devices could literally refuse to crash into one another. Pretty slick, that. They could “talk” to one another, exchange data like Bump, that app where you touch two smartphones together to exchange generally useless information. Just think: your car could be doing that.

Second, hacking is about to get a hell of a lot messier.

Which is why I’ll likely stay with the bike, no matter what jetcars show up.