AUDIO: BLIND MAN TAKES RIDE IN SELF-DRIVING GOOGLE CAR

A blind man has successfully traveled around Austin, Texas – unaccompanied – in a car without a steering wheel or floor pedals, Google announced on Tuesday. Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, was the first non-Google employee to ride alone in the Google autonomous car. “It is like driving with a very good driver,” Mahan said. “If you close your eyes when you’re riding with somebody you get a sense of whether this is a good driver, or whether they’re not. These self-driving cars drive like a very good driver.” Mahan said, “I had the greatest time driving around a neighborhood in Austin, Texas. It was so much fun, being aware that the vehicle was navigating intersections, and I was in good hands, perfectly safe.”
* So it went pretty well for an experiment on a human.
* Except that the car let him out in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
* Okay, the car can drive. That doesn’t mean some moron won’t T-bone you.
* And there’s no steering wheel, so you can’t even veer out of the way.
* Is there an ejector seat so you can just get the hell out if things go south?
* This could bode well for the holiday drinking season.
* With driverless cars, we could finally bring back the wild office parties.
* Oh, I see what they’re doing. Introduce the cars with a sentimental story – someone you’d pull for – and then sell it to the masses later.
* Wow, I wonder how much they paid him to say things like, “perfectly safe”?
* If you think the email hacks are bad, wait until somebody hacks into a driverless car.
CLIP: Dustin Hoffman as Rain Man: “I’m an excellent driver.”