#AutonomousCars

Ford’s patent application was filed on Nov. 23, 2016 but only published May 24, 2018, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Coincidentally, application was published just a week before General Motors settled a lawsuit with a motorcyclist involved in an accident with one of its autonomous cars.

Motorcycles are outlawed. Gasoline is $20 per gallon. Self-driving cars are becoming dominant. Silicon Valley tech firms and the U.S. Government have collaborated to push society toward a fully-autonomous transportation system and motorcycles are an easy first target in the campaign to ban human-operated vehicles. This is the plot basis for the first season of The Last Motorcycle On Earth, a new and dramatic fictional three-part series (so far) that takes a look into the future and the new world of technology that threatens to destroy a motorcyclist’s passion and way of life.

Ah, beige. Like the apocryphal story about Eskimos having 18 different words for snow, so do car companies have many, many words for beige. There’s Stone; Bisque; Ash; Caramel; Camel; Smoke; Champagne; Linen; Almond; Shale; Sepia; Buff; Sorrel; Harvest; Sky Cool Gray and one for the fellas: Alloy. Those are just the interior colors. For the hard candy shell, Lexus sports Truffle Mica, Audi has a Beluga Brown, Porsche offers Cognac Metallic and Toyota, without irony, shows off its Toasted Walnut minivan.

The November issue of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Monthly Report was all about motorcyclists and how Google is tackling the difficult task of designing an autonomous vehicle that’s capable of safely sharing the road with smaller, lighter, faster accelerating and braking motorcycles. Lucky for us, a senior software engineer named Christian is involved with developing Google’s autonomous technology.

It’s a cute, fuzzy lil’ harbinger of the end of Life as we Know it: the Google self-driving car. Seriously. Right now you may think of it as a curiosity, a gimmick, but it could alter the physical, economic and cultural landscape of America in a way we haven’t seen since … well … the invention of the car in the first place. But what will that do to poor little us on our motorcycles?