You confuse the venue with the "goods", sir. Don't pay so much attention to the messenger
as to the message itself, of which infowars was not the source.
Eric Peters certainly delivers NEWS. Great website he has, very informative.
Now...
On to the actual subject at hand, namely, cars becoming more and more autonomous.
When I bought my first "drive by wire" vehicle (my '04 Ram), the first thing that occurred to me is
that they went to method of throttle input (notice I didn't say "control" there) because Dodge had
just been through all manner of issues with their automatics failing left and right.
What better way to help protect their dainty electronic transmissions than to control the torque applied
to them at a given speed/gear/throttle position than to simply take over the throttle from the human, right?
The industry term for it was "torque management". Oy. Thanks, Mercedes....
Of course, one of the first things aftermarket performance programmers went after was that very thing -
where factory programming took a lot of torque out of dead stop takeoffs and in between shifts, the
"chip" guys took a bunch of it back out, making for better acceleration.
Then, the SECOND thing that occurred to me was something far more conspiratory and nefarious...
Ok, if the vehicle is pretty much controlling the throttle itself AND satellite communications were already
on-board with most all vehicles, what's to say at some point an overbearing authority couldn't assume
CONTROL of the vehicle speed?
The technology is certainly in existence and my vehicle is pretty much equipped to receive the signal
from the mother ship, so.... hmmm??
Some years later, our friends in Europe start working on these self-governing vehicles, working outside
of their owners' control/desire if need be in order to enforce speed limits.
I catch wind of that and my old paranoia about the Ram's drive by wire come racing back into my mind.
Yup...maybe that wasn't such a crazy notion after all, eh?