Be Careful What You Joke About: VW Makes Self-Driving Stroller
(ACHTUNG!/YouTube)
Oh, it’s crazy all right. So crazy it just might work.
A viral video making the rounds in recent days depicts an odd new prototype initiative from Volkswagen. It’s a self-driving baby stroller, kinda-sorta, inspired by a company Facebook post soliciting new ideas from customers.
Like a lot of people, I expect, the idea of self-driving cars makes me nervous. But that’s OK — it’s the 21st century and I’ve learned to live with a certain level of low-simmering technological anxiety. But a self-driving baby stroller? Madness, right?
The tone of the baby stroller video is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, and the seriousness of the new initiative is somewhat ambiguous. Germans do have a singular sense of humor. But the technology is plenty real. The VW engineers simply took existing driver-assistance technology — adaptive cruise control, automatic braking — and slapped it onto a baby buggy. “We took a sensor from a Golf,” says a VW engineer in the 97-second online post.
The video shows the baby buggy following a volunteer dad as he strolls around town. Instead of pushing the stroller, the stroller follows him — keeping about five feet behind and braking automatically to avoid obstacles. It’s fun to watch passersby panic and lunge as the unattended baby stroller rolls by. You can tell which ones are moms — they have those mongoose reflexes.
At any rate, the VW self-driving stroller is basically a goof at this point – the kind of thing that can happen when you give engineers too much leash. But beware: the history of tech innovation is littered with real products that started out as pranks or hoaxes. So be careful what you joke about.
My favorite example of this is the frankly awesome Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, originally proposed by those rascals over at ThinkGeek as a fake product for an April Fools’ Day feature. Star Wars fans will remember the inspiration for this — the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo has to rescue a typically hapless Luke Skywalker by warming him in steaming entrails on the ice planet of Hoth.
The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. (Photo: ThinkGeek)
ThinkGeek got such an enthusiastic response to the sleeping bag idea that they secured the rights from Lucasfilm and made it into an actual product. It’s still a bestseller — $149 plus tax, complete with fabric intestines and a lightsaber zipper pull. Genius.
Then there was the infamous iLoo project from Microsoft. In 2003, a division of Microsoft U.K. announced the deployment of an Internet-enabled portable toilet, outfitted with wireless broadband, an adjustable display, and a waterproof keyboard — the term “waterproof” being euphemistic, presumably.
The iLoo. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The iLoo was instantly ridiculed, naturally. Microsoft backpedaled, claiming the project was just a hoax. Later revelations disclosed the iLoo was indeed put into development, although the project was subsequently canceled. In a rather satisfying little coda to the story, the Wi-Fi portable toilet has since become a reality.
Click around online and you can find many more examples of joke innovations that eventually turned into real things. The Simpsons’ Leftorium, for instance.
The moral of the story: Be careful what you joke about. Today’s goof is tomorrow’s reality, and facts get weirder than fiction with each passing year. Science marches on.
Glenn McDonald writes about the intersections of technology and culture at glenn-mcdonald.com and via Twitter @glennmcdonald1.
