Driving Miss Angela

When I win the lottery, the first thing I am going to do is hire a chauffeur. As you will see from the picture, I do have a household member who is chafing at the bit to take on this role, but he has limitations such as his excessive use of catnip, and a propensity to stop and lick himself in traffic.

I love the idea of being driven everywhere I want to go by a professional driver and never having to worry about road conditions, parallel parking, pumping gas, checking oil, braving the carwash, whether the flashing light in the rearview mirror is for me, or navigating to my destination.

I could arrive fresh and rested at conferences and soirees instead of prying my blanched knuckles from the steering wheel, and performing contortions under the dash to change out of my threadbare driving shoes into high heels fit for the occasion.

OK, so I don’t actually attend that many soirees or wear high heels, but the odd conference does still appear in my calendar.

Alternatively, by the time I actually do win the lottery, self-driving cars may be readily available to the general public. We already have autonomous tractors, buses and trucks, Robotaxis currently cruise the streets of San Francisco and Honda launched a driverless car in Japan in 2021. From what I have been reading on the Kelley Blue Book site, many other car manufacturers are developing their own models of autonomous passenger vehicles too.

But there are still some engineering mountains to climb, and a tangle of different regulatory requirements around the world as you’d imagine. But it was this line in the article that dashed my hopes forever.

“A car that can drive itself on well-maintained roads may make a critical mistake on poorly maintained roads.”

Well, that rules out self-driving cars for Manitoba.