Lenders Can Now Disable Your Car When You're Driving on the Freeway: People with poor credit are being sold cars with GPS-based kill switches.
How this is legal is beyond me. What if someone was on their way to the hospital or in traffic on a super highway at high speed? This is so unsafe and unfair.
Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car
Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctor’s appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway.
A woman living in Las Vegas was only 3 days behind on her payment, and her car was shut down as she was driving her child, who had a 103.5 degree temperature and an asthma attack, to the ER. Another woman's car's engine stopped and the steering wheel locked up while driving on a Las Vegas freeway, and her friend had to push the car off the highway in heavy traffic.
I sat in a car that parked itself, which was nifty, but the driverless maneuver also gave me the creeps. It's one thing to have a flat tire or a malfunction while we are still in control of the steering wheel, gears, ignition, and so forth, but what if your car accelerates or turns in a direction that causes an accident and you can't do anything to rectify it?
Jeff Foxall, "an award-winning motoring journalist based in the UK who writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph Cars section," asks a good question: Are driverless cars an accident waiting to happen?
Perhaps more importantly, is just how much control we would cede. I would be happy to let a car do the driving in a slow-moving motorway traffic jam. I'm not sure about driverless cars in a congested urban environment. And I'm even less certain about having cars running around without a capable driver even in them. Perry is right: driverless cars could be transformational. But at the moment, there are too many questions to know if that's going to be in a good way.
If lending companies don't need the repo man anymore, because they can remotely
turn off your car, then it begs the question: does the Godfather still need a hit man when it's possible to steer your car off a ravine or into a tree with one of these GPS gizmos?
"It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness." Repo Man