Let's Call Them Autonomobiles Now
It's always annoying to choose between 'self-driving cars' and 'driverless cars' or 'autonomous cars' or any other of a number of clunky terms for cars that can drive without human control. Here's a new term: autonomobile.
Former TTAC editor and current Bloomberg contributor Ed Niedermeyer coined this the other day. It came around as a response to Wired's new demonstration of increasingly present car hacking.
There are a lot of people out here worrying about the first autonomobile at-fault crash. I'm way more worried about first car hack murder.
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) July 21, 2015
Things went from there.
Meet the Potemkin autonomobile test city. How is this a substitute for Google's millions of real-world miles? https://t.co/0KEsrVIVWQ
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) July 21, 2015
And Bloomberg's Matt Miller caught on.
It's a neat summation of the tech that's been booming ever since DARPA challenged the world to drive across the desert without any human control.
Expect to see it in use more often.
Photo Credit: Cadillac
Contact the author at raphael@jalopnik.com.