The real Faraday could've fought a 10-year-old Nic Tesla when he was 75

November 6, 2015 2:05 PM

The mysterious Faraday Future (yes, that's the real name), has already hired 400 top automotive engineers (such as the former director of manufacturing for Tesla) and is building a $1B facility to create a new type of electric car as soon as 2017. But what is Faraday Future? Some think its part of Apple's secret "Titan" car project (which will have electric license plates!), while others think it is "China's response to Tesla." The auto industry is changing fast, as, also within the last 24 hours, Toyota started investing $1B in AI and Local Motors rolled out their latest 3D-printed car design.
posted by blahblahblah (51 comments total)

We all know deep down inside that it's Skynet, right? I assume you're listening, Skynet? We're still cool, yeah?
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:21 PM on November 6, 2015 [7 favorites]

could these be made from carbon fiber so we're not eating as much steel and burning as much energy?
posted by eustatic at 2:25 PM on November 6, 2015

Isn't carbon fiber hella expensive? And, yes, I just said 'hella".
posted by I-baLL at 2:32 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I-baLL: "Isn't carbon fiber hella expensive? And, yes, I just said 'hella"."

Expensive (and difficult) to manufacture, but the input materials are virtually free.

It can be really, really nasty stuff too -- at various points in the manufacturing process, it has asbestos-like qualities.
posted by schmod at 2:36 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sounds like another boutique-mobile that will struggle to come in under six figures...
posted by jim in austin at 2:40 PM on November 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

It will all seem like fun and games until the first cages start rolling off the assembly line.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:44 PM on November 6, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm sure you can all point to me and laugh a few years from now, but I'm pretty skeptical about the prospects for self-driving cars.

I really, truly believe that there are very few people who truly understand the scope and extent of the gap between the technologies we have now, and the technologies that we'll need to commercialize autonomous vehicles. The people who actually do understand this gap are virtually all behind extremely restrictive NDAs.

This is most obviously evident in the flurry of recent press coverage around self-driving cars. The coverage is light on technical details, and completely devoid of any sort of analysis. Few corporations could even dream of that kind of uncritical, free PR.

99% Invisible did a pretty good episode of some of the technological and social problems that improved automation is going to introduce, and noted that we're probably not going to see a revolution of autonomous vehicles. Rather, we're going to gradually see intelligent safety features gradually added to cars.

Just like ABS and ESC were introduced and eventually standardized, I think that we're going to start to see features related to freeway collision-avoidance introduced, and maybe some extremely limited autonomous commercial vehicles (ie. in dedicated lanes on a freeway).

But driverless cars? I'm not holding my breath. Among other things, the trust/security story hasn't really been explored or understood at all, and I don't think that full (or even partial) automation is going to be accepted by the masses until we've figured that out (or decided that it's inherently unsolvable).

Part of me wonders if an automotive executive got taken in by this hype and is throwing buckets of money at the problem, because they believe that there's actually somebody else who is making meaningful progress toward a commercial product.
posted by schmod at 2:47 PM on November 6, 2015 [17 favorites]

Also, given the absolutely exemplary record of the American automotive industry over the past 30 years, I totally understand why investors only seem to be throwing money at American manufacturers working on this stuff.
posted by schmod at 2:49 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Apple's secret "Titan" car project

Having used several recent Apple OS releases, I'll know to STAY THE FUCK AWAY from these. (But, hey. Emoji license plates. Boom.)
posted by schmod at 2:53 PM on November 6, 2015 [8 favorites]

huh, the LAT article yesterday said: "The company is run by a management team and doesn't have a chief executive," which with, "There is a significant investor who has an international profile and wants the company to stand on its own merits before making the association," i would have guessed might be apple, but now it's "Faraday spokeswoman Stacy Morris confirmed that Chaoying Deng is the chief executive but said that she wasn't involved in the day-to-day operations of the auto company," so jia yueting? apple could still buy volkswagon tho!

re: driverless cars...
12 Steps of Recovery from Self-Driving Car Hype

also btw...
The Electric Boy :P
posted by kliuless at 2:56 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Faraday is credited with the discovery of electromagnetic induction, so I was thinking maybe a car with a relatively small battery which mainly relied on coils in the car that got power from coils in the road, but the Apple Titan link describes a car with a bigger battery than a Tesla.
posted by jamjam at 3:05 PM on November 6, 2015

which will have electric license plates!

I assuming your talking about the guy MacRumors found on LinkedIn yesterday.

I'll say two things about it:

1) Anyone can put anything they want into their LinkedIn profiles. Every person reading this post can give themselves some "Engineer on Totes Secret Apple Automotive Project" job and there is zero anyone can/will do about it. In fact, if you want to get internet famous, give yourself an automative sounding title and a job and Apple and one of these sites will use it as proof the Apple car is real.

2) This guy's name, as spelt, does not show up in the corp directory.
posted by sideshow at 3:09 PM on November 6, 2015

maybe some extremely limited autonomous commercial vehicles (ie. in dedicated lanes on a freeway).

They don't need dedicated lanes. Freeway driving (outside of a snowstorm or something) is exactly the sort of driving that computers can already easily do better than people.
posted by sfenders at 3:10 PM on November 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

They don't need dedicated lanes. Freeway driving (outside of a snowstorm or something) is exactly the sort of driving that computers can already easily do better than people.

Yeah, I drive the 280 into work and every day I see a Tesla or two with a driver with both hands off the wheel, heads down, writing emails or whatever on their phone.

I haven't see any Tesla on the shoulder with a smashed in front, so it works well enough to not rear end people all the time.
posted by sideshow at 3:15 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

schmod: I think it comes down to your definition of self-driving. I think what most people are looking for is cruise control with lane nav. and collision avoidance predicated on the assumption that the driver can have hands on wheel in ~3 seconds. Basically: I think people want to text/browse facebook/youtube during the long boring highway part of their commute. Somewhere between what the NHTSA calls Level 2 and Level 3 automation. An example of Level 3 automation has already been approved by the NHTSA for the Freightliner Inspiration.

Fully automatic driving where your car could effectively be shared with many other users/go play taxi to earn its own purchase back for you while you're at work (Level 4 automation) - I expect we'll both be dead before that happens.
posted by Ryvar at 3:15 PM on November 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

I just wish instead of spending all this intelligence on cars and the isolating lifestyle they support, we could be making really awesome subway diggers and capital gains tax–collecting bots instead.
posted by dame at 3:26 PM on November 6, 2015 [20 favorites]

Perhaps they have a decent micro-capacitor/ultra-capacitor array for power. Reducing charging times would be a huge step forward.
posted by underflow at 3:28 PM on November 6, 2015

Maybe it's just food. I like food.
posted by alex_skazat at 3:45 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Faraday is credited with the discovery of electromagnetic induction

Also with parma violets, so you'll need to work those into your theory.
posted by biffa at 3:46 PM on November 6, 2015

Come up with a way for Parma violets to power a car, and I'll give it a shot!
posted by jamjam at 3:56 PM on November 6, 2015

Remember, a fully autonomous car does not have to be perfect, it just has to be as good as a human driver. With billions of dollars of labor expenses to eliminate, I'll bet the industry fixes the technological challenges before of self driving cars before humans stop driving under the influence of drugs and medications, driving distracted, or falling asleep at the wheel.
posted by rustcrumb at 4:02 PM on November 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

Faraday is credited with the discovery of electromagnetic induction

Also with parma violets

Source needed beyond some guy on Twitter called "Bonko" making the same assertion.
Plus I'd have been much more impressed if it was parma ham.
posted by w0mbat at 4:15 PM on November 6, 2015

The WSJ link is behind a paywall for me so I'm not sure what sort of weasel words might be in the article but no way these guys go from not even having a factory or the site for it (or just a conception drawing of the car for that matter) to mass producing a car in a year and half to two years.

This year Volvo said it would spend about half that much on a plant in South Carolina that will open in 2018 and produce up to 100,000 cars annually.

posted by Mitheral at 4:19 PM on November 6, 2015

Part of me wonders if an automotive executive got taken in by this hype and is throwing buckets of money at the problem, because they believe that there's actually somebody else who is making meaningful progress toward a commercial product.

Search your favorite search engine on the phrase "self-driving mining trucks", if you think this stuff isn't already being sold as a solved problem.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 4:49 PM on November 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure this is not the Apple car project. The location of the Apple car team is a known secret, and it's in Sunnyvale (right next to Cupertino). This company lists its address as Gardena, which is in LA County.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:20 PM on November 6, 2015

I want them to go aggressively anti-cool with the ad campaign and have all the commercials feature The Electric Slide, with scores of cheerful suburbanite actors doing the dance non-ironically and the tagline "It's Electric!", and also the car's radio will only play that song and also you can't turn it off.
posted by dephlogisticated at 5:25 PM on November 6, 2015 [7 favorites]

Ryvar mentioned the Freightliner Inspiration.

While this tech probably does work 95% of the time I really wonder about the 5%. My company has a truck in deep and expensive repair right now because it had a front tire blowout at 65 MPH. The driver was helpless to prevent the truck from slamming into a concrete abutment, doing major damage, but it's a good thing the abutment was there because the truck would probably have gone across the heavily traveled oncoming lanes and into a swamp if it wasn't there. How does Freightliner's AI cope with that?

And more recently traffic was snarled for a whole day due to a horrific accident caused by this asshat, who tried to pass two tractor-trailers that were side by side on the right shoulder unaware that the right shoulder has an expiration date when you're approaching a navigable river crossing. The semis did nothing wrong but one of them ended up in the water with the driver dead.

I've recently read that autonomous cars have a real problem of not being aggressive enough compared to human drivers. Solving that problem in the AI of a big rig really does sound like the recipe for Skynet v0.1.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:19 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well Greg I guess I didn't make my concern clear. The driver couldn't keep the truck from going into the abutment, but he did keep it from going over it by jerking the wheel and locking the brakes; as far as we can tell from the damage to the truck it was a damn close thing that it didn't flip into the median. Had he taken no action at all he might have bounced off the abutment and into the traffic in the right lane. And five years ago that abutment wasn't there, what would have happened then? Our driver has had nightmares about that.

I guess the AI driver at least won't have to carry a change of underwear, which our homo sapiens driver said he almost needed.
posted by Bringer Tom at 8:20 PM on November 6, 2015

All I see is a very thin little website with some ex-Tesla employees, supposedly.

You have to build something, and that something has be impressive, in order to garner any respect - and a tiny little amateurish website is not the something to which I refer!
posted by Yosemite Sam at 8:44 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bringer Tom: "The driver couldn't keep the truck from going into the abutment, but he did keep it from going over it by jerking the wheel and locking the brakes; as far as we can tell from the damage to the truck it was a damn close thing that it didn't flip into the median."

This kind of action under pressure with very slight margins and short reaction times is probably where self-driving AIs are most superior to human drivers. The AI can coolly calculate braking distance, likelihood of different outcomes, knows the exact weight of the truck, the height of the abutment, can see the amount of traffic around it and in the other, oncoming lanes, sensors can pick up how much traction and control is actually lost, and how hard it can steer without losing grip... I'm convinced it could have done at least as well as your driver, and probably better. Humans are not great at emergencies.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:17 PM on November 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

The robot would also be incapable of having nightmares afterward and would be spared a sense of vague terror that would follow it for the rest of its life.

Imagine if during the accident a turtle had gotten flipped over onto its back, though.
posted by No-sword at 10:57 PM on November 6, 2015 [14 favorites]

The whole truck emergency thing reminds me of something I read years back, about automated stock trading systems. They were, even back then, very good at predicting market developments (on the short term, at least), but one big problem with them was that generally they had humans overseeing them, being able to override their decisions, and that would invariably happen when there were crises or other large market movements/volatility. The computer would make a call that looked weird or extreme to the human operator, who would override, leading to a less beneficial outcome than the computer's original call. Humans are bad, bad, bad at emergencies, high-pressure situations, risk evaluation, and so on.

I think it's probably harder to make an AI driver work better than humans at the mundane driving tasks, like moving smoothly through regular traffic.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:55 PM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state

Most common job in most US states? Still Truck Driver.
posted by Joe Chip at 12:31 AM on November 7, 2015

The robot would also be incapable of having nightmares afterward and would be spared a sense of vague terror that would follow it for the rest of its life.

here's how musk describes tesla's 'fleet learning network': "The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it... [each driver using the autopilot system essentially becomes an] expert trainer for how the autopilot should work."

so kinda, sorta like how image/speech recognition and language translation have gotten better and better over the years with more use/training feeding back into lower error rates i guess (but some order of magnitude harder)?

anyway, here's how the head of google's driverless car program describes how google's AI sees the road and then 'sleeps' on it (perchance to dream?): "We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience(!) that our vehicles have."

Most common job in most US states? Still Truck Driver.

/r/BasicIncome discussion :P
posted by kliuless at 1:06 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Driverless cars would have to be pretty bad to equal the shitty record of human drivers. More than 30,000 dead every year just in the US bad.

Manufacturers should start a racing series for all-electric cars, whether driven by humans, machines, or human/machine combinations. Let people see how the best human drivers in the world compare to auto-autos in all sorts of tight situations.
posted by pracowity at 3:02 AM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: it has asbestos-like qualities.
posted by Fizz at 5:09 AM on November 7, 2015

Yeah, I drive the 280 into work and every day I see a Tesla or two with a driver with both hands off the wheel, heads down, writing emails or whatever on their phone.

So basically what this is doing is alleviating the annoyance of lengthy commutes so everyone can collectively blow even more energy shuttling from Sprawly Suburb A to Sprawly Suburb B and back every day. That does not seem like a great outcome.

Meanwhile, in the aviation industry, they are much further advanced in automating piloting tasks. The standard of safety that must be met under their regulatory regime is far, far higher than in the auto industry. And yet the automated systems can still give up under exceptional conditions (like, say, sensors failing). When this happens, a team of people that have trained for years in aircraft flight, have to routinely requalify with supplemental simulator training and medical exams, and are paid to do what they're doing — they're the people behind the controls who jump in to handle the situation.

So now you've got Oblivious Silicon Valley Techbro, who has been absorbed in writing emails or whatever and maybe meets the standard of your typical American driver, which is to say that there was a cursory DMV exam at some point in years or possibly decades past and that's about it. What happens when the computer gives up with 3 seconds notice and demands that he handle... what's going on again? Chad was saying the git repo was d... *splat*. This also does not seem like a great outcome.
posted by indubitable at 5:15 AM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Indubitable has a really good point. Air France 440 crashed because a sensor (Pitot tube) failed causing the autopilot to freak, and the human pilot mostly had experience sitting in the chair watching the autopilot do its thing instead of actually flying the plane, and he didn't know how to react himself when his whole job was to be there if the autopilot freaked.

If you think human drivers are bad now imagine how great they'll be when most of them have only ever put hands on the steering wheel at the driving test. Those automatic systems had better be good because for practical purposes they're going to be all we got.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:25 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Which is a completely fair point, but not terribly difficult to address in the case of highway driving: set more sensitive trigger conditions on "human needed" than is strictly necessary, and once that trigger flags begin chiming and gradually reducing speed until human hands are back on the wheel. Begin pulling onto the shoulder if available once below a minimum safe speed.

My actual worry here is assholes falling asleep, waking up with a start and inadvertently slamming the gas pedal down. Which is pretty much why we'll always have the auto insurance industry until Level 4 automation is legally mandated and humans are out of the loop in all but extremely unusual circumstances (construction/emergencies).

As far as catastrophic circumstances go - if your collision avoidance is doing its job at all, in a highway situation the AI is a) following much further back than most human drivers do in practice, b) reacting at sub-millisecond times to any delta in terms of obstructions ahead (human drivers are generally expected to react within 0.75 seconds, and speed limits/recommended following distances are based on this + huge safety margin). Sensor failure scenarios will be vanishingly rare simply due to auto insurer mandates, which will probably look something like all proximity sensors in triplicate, system uses the mean of the two closest readings after filtering through contextually reasonable value ranges.

All of this seems pretty common sense, though since I'm just an interested casual observer it's entirely possible I'm overlooking something obvious in the above.
posted by Ryvar at 6:05 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fully automatic driving where your car could effectively be shared with many other users/go play taxi to earn its own purchase back for you while you're at work (Level 4 automation) - I expect we'll both be dead before that happens.--Ryvar

Yes, you can buy level 2 automation cars now and the level 3 are coming soon. But anyone living and working near Mountain View sees level 4 automation cars on the road all the time. It is not just Google--because they allow it here it seems every manufacturer has their self-driving cars driving around--including busy downtown streets with lots of pedestrians. I'm not saying they will be in the public's hands tomorrow, but I'm convinced that it will be long before we are dead.

You should save your comment to show to your grandkids---they'll probably have a good laugh about it (I remember when my parents thought the idea of computers being in people's houses was a completely absurd idea).
posted by eye of newt at 6:39 AM on November 7, 2015 [7 favorites]

>But anyone living and working near Mountain View sees level 4 automation cars on the road all the time.

Yeah, they're already commercializing driverless campus shuttles. I'd give it ten years.

Considering the size of the existing car fleet and their lifespan (~20 years?), we might all be if not dead at least retired before they've become the dominant form of transportation. I'm typically not a techno-utopian but this feels like it's going to drip drip drip and then… just be the new normal.
posted by pmv at 7:33 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can tell you it's not Apple-- that website sucks.
posted by searust at 7:59 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I-Ball

Check this out
posted by sfts2 at 8:11 AM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ryvar: " if your collision avoidance is doing its job at all, in a highway situation the AI is a) following much further back than most human drivers do in practice, b) reacting at sub-millisecond times to any delta in terms of obstructions ahead (human drivers are generally expected to react within 0.75 seconds, and speed limits/recommended following distances are based on this + huge safety margin)."

We used to go trolling for taillights. I wonder if bored teenagers in the future will go around messing with autopilot cars.
posted by Mitheral at 12:00 PM on November 7, 2015

If you think human drivers are bad now imagine how great they'll be when most of them have only ever put hands on the steering wheel at the driving test. Those automatic systems had better be good because for practical purposes they're going to be all we got.

There just shouldn't be human drivers at all. Everyone should be a passenger. No steering wheels or pedals. Normal car use should be as complicated as operating an elevator, and manually driven cars should be as rare as horses on the interstate. And untrained, unlicensed 8-year-old should be able to take a car to school, hop out at the approved unloading place, and watch the car drive away back home.

The car should deal with everything on multiple levels with multiple redundancy for sensors and navigation and so on (inertial guidance, local sensors, recorded maps, etc.), and it should work in real time with every other car on the road so your car benefits from everything the cars ahead of you have just experienced and your car helps every car behind you. Every turn and bump and ice patch and pothole and puddle and dead animal could be mapped out in real time by the cars driving over them.

In the rare cases when a car can't deal, it should just shut down as safely as possible, and the rest of the automated cars on the road should avoid such meltdown cars until an automatically called rescue vehicle arrives.
posted by pracowity at 3:59 PM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

pracowity: "There just shouldn't be human drivers at all. Everyone should be a passenger. No steering wheels or pedals."

That's just a complete non-starter around here. How would you direct a car across a field? Or hook up a trailer? Or unload a boat? Navigate a construction site? Push a car with another car? Flat tow a vehicle? Drive through tall grass or ford a water way?

Maybe 0.5% of my driving isn't on something your average person or a pseudo-AI would recognize as a road but it's a pretty critical last mile 0.5%.

Here's where I was a couple months ago. I realise my use case isn't universal but this sort of road is not an uncommon thing for many people to need to navigate. And even if you didn't the same perception that has people buy SUVs and 4X4 and then never go anywhere they couldn't get in a Civic will keep manual controls around.

More mundanely how do you direct a car into a parking space in say a parkade or on a ferry? Or navigate a drive thru?

If (and I think it is still a pretty big if) fully autonomous cars become a thing there are going to be large swaths of people who are going to need something they don't provide and will need manual control.
posted by Mitheral at 5:14 PM on November 7, 2015

pracowity: "And untrained, unlicensed 8-year-old should be able to take a car to school, hop out at the approved unloading place, and watch the car drive away back home."

pracowity: "In the rare cases when a car can't deal, it should just shut down as safely as possible, and the rest of the automated cars on the road should avoid such meltdown cars until an automatically called rescue vehicle arrives."

One of the problems with fully autonomous cars (as opposed to self driving cars where there is always a driver available) is how they fail at the edges. What is the failure mode during something like the the 2014 Atlanta snow/ice storm which apparently came on unexpectedly or the Moore tornado? How do they handle a city wide power outage or an MMS 8 earthquake? You can't have eight year olds hanging out on the side of a freeway unsupervised for hours or overnight. Transit systems handle this by having people in authority around or at fellow adult travelers.
posted by Mitheral at 6:07 PM on November 7, 2015

I absolutely adore the total certainty most of you are exercising in your statements about how self-driving cars are a fantasy and will never happen, or not happen in our lifetimes, and so forth and so on.

I've lived and worked in Mountain View since 1998. The Level 4 future is here now. I drive to work next to it every day. It drives through my neighborhood damn near hourly. There are entire secondary industries springing up here to supply and cater to the self-driving future.

I would say that we're within about 5 years, at the outside, of self-driving vehicles becoming the predominant form of transportation in the SF Bay Area. For that matter, self-driving, plug-in ZEV's.

As with so much else, adoption is going to be highest among the upper classes: driving a fossil-fuel vehicle is going to
become a class marker. Only the poor, or those wealthy enough to be eccentric, will drive gas-burners.

This is already happening: a few years ago, the Prius became a status marker among the moneyed in the area. Then the plug-in Priuses.

Then came Tesla, and the Tesla Roadster became the status symbol, because pretty much just anyone could afford a Prius and they had become common, in both the demographic and socioeconomic meanings.

Cut to the introduction of the Tesla Model S. It was and still is (until the Model X gets properly to market) the current status marker.

When the first self-driving cars come to market, they'll come to market here, and they will instantly sell out. It's the nearest thing to a sure thing you can get outside whatever gets announced at WWDC.

But all of this is just data and market trends. I base my certainty on something else entirely.

This past Halloween, as we walked around the neighborhood, we saw kids dressed up as self-driving cars.
posted by scrump at 8:01 PM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well sure, Cars costumes are popular here too.
posted by Mitheral at 8:39 PM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

You can't have eight year olds hanging out on the side of a freeway unsupervised for hours or overnight.

Helicopter parents can just send their helicopters.

You can't lock up your children all day every day of their childhoods just because the storm of the century might come today of all the 36,500 days in the century. Kids who get stuck call home or press the big red "Emergency" button. The car itself automatically calls for help. Someone comes and gets them while other people talk to them. We're not talking about being stranded at the top of Everest. It would be a test of the city and its people, not a test of automated cars.

I would also bet automatic cars in Atlanta running the same software software they run in Alaska would handle a surprise snowfall much better than it was handled by all those human drivers in Atlanta who had never driven on snow.
posted by pracowity at 12:38 AM on November 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

So now you've got Oblivious Silicon Valley Techbro, who has been absorbed in writing emails or whatever and maybe meets the standard of your typical American driver, which is to say that there was a cursory DMV exam at some point in years or possibly decades past and that's about it. What happens when the computer gives up with 3 seconds notice and demands that he handle... what's going on again? Chad was saying the git repo was d... *splat*. This also does not seem like a great outcome.

I didn't even have to park between real cars, or real cones on my driving test. The facilitator was just like "ok, pretend there's a car there and there, i'll tell you if you run in to one. It's between that line in the curb and that paint mark, ok go".

I hammed it up like William Shatner because i thought it was stupid and kept making jokes about how close i was. I think he deducted a couple points for "too much jockeying". You know, between the invisible cars.

There are people i know with valid drivers licenses who failed the invisible car test.
posted by emptythought at 5:45 PM on November 8, 2015