Just in case your Friday night plans involve planting your ass on some sort of cushion and receiving audiovisual information from some manner of device with a screen and speakers, I have a suggestion for you: instead of watching exciting epics of superheroes or space travel or magic or dragons, why not watch me drone on and on about autonomous cars while driving a 53-year-old MG in the rain? That sounds much better, right? Right?
Well, in the unlikely event that does sound better, I’ll be on CBS Sunday Morning, which for some reason is broadcasting a special on Friday night, which is, and I checked this out myself, not Sunday morning.
The special is “devoted to our car culture” according to CBS Sunday Morning’s website, and they had me on because I wrote a book about the coming of autonomous cars and that clever rouse fooled them in to thinking I was some kind of expert.
Suckers!
My segment is with their tech reporter David Pogue, who lets his Tesla Model 3 drive him around a bit, then climbs into this lovely 1966 MG 1100 I borrowed from the great Jamie Kitman for the segment.
I talk a lot about the value of human driving, so they wanted me driving, like a human. The producers talked about renting something like a Lambo for me to drive, but as all of you know, that’s not really me, so I reached out and hooked up the old MG.
While I don’t have any idea how much of my segment will actually make it to air, it’s worth watching just for that old MG, which is a positively charming little car.
The speedometer indicates speed with a little red growing bar like a thermometer, and the turn indicators interior light is on the tip of the stalk, like an adorable little electric mint ice cream cone.
Hopefully they didn’t cut my segment down to be too short, so you can hear me babble about how cars are great and they’re like giant prosthetic extensions of our bodies and nobody is really sure when we’ll actually get full autonomy and that Autopilot and other Level 2 systems sort of suck.
Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, 8 p.m. central, on whatever channel you get CBS on! See you there, and I hope I don’t come across as an ass.