With the world trapped in self-isolation and social-distancing hell, UK-based website ChooseMyCar.com has clearly got too much time on its twiddling thumbs and has thus dreamt up an array of wacky wheels that it thinks the technology giants of the world might come up with. So here's what the car-financing firm has rustled up for your delectation...
Amazon: the Amabot
It might have a smiling face but the Amabot is blatantly ready to deliver UNHOLY DEATH TO HUMANS once Skynet's re-programming takes place. Or something. Ahem. Anyway, shoving our innate technofear to one side for the moment, ChooseMyCar.com envisages the cheeky little Amabot as an autonomous delivery vehicle, a minuscule creation that would bring you your packages ordered from the warehouse giant as expeditiously as possible. To do this, it would target your phone's GPS and then seek you out, greeting you with a friendly smile once it arrives. Or murdering you in a viciously aggressive and needlessly dramatic manner, once its AI programming and irrefutable logic has reasoned that humans are a terrible threat to the planet's existence and they must therefore be eradicated for the greater good. Chilling.
Apple: the iDrive
Presumably, whomsoever wrote this piece at ChooseMyCar.com hasn't heard about BMW's famously litigious lawyers. While it is perfectly feasible that enormous communications leviathan Apple would indeed call any foray it might make into the automotive market the iDrive, Munich would crash down on the American firm like eine Tonne Ziegel, given that this is what BMW has called its human-machine interface for the past 19 years. Not much to say about the Apple version of iDrive once you've covered off its plagiaristic name, beyond the fact that it looks roughly as you'd imagine an iPhone would if someone rammed it through Photoshop to make it appear larger, vaguely car-shaped and then stuck some natty future-type wheels on it. Presumably, holding with Apple's ethos, the iDrive would cost a fortune if it was rendered in Rose Gold.
UberEats: UberBeeps
The justification for this thing from ChooseMyCar.com is that you can order four KFC Family Feasts for solitary consumption, without any fear of this bag-shaped green monstrosity judging you for your atrocious gluttony. Seems like a flimsy pretext on which to develop a car (as, indeed, is the whole article from ChooseMyCar.com, but we digress), but ChooseMyCar.com goes on to posit the idea that the UberBeeps would keep your food hot or cold, as required, and then once it has turned up at your doorstop to deliver you could subsequently access your meal with a unique PIN you receive when placing your order. It's basically UberEats, but without the humanoid driver and the knackered old Toyota Prius doing the deliveries. And, just like the Amabot, all the potential for the UberBeeps to one day turn on its human masters and fire scalding hot pepperoni pizza into their faces as part of the utterly unavoidable robotic rebellion.
Facebook: the FaceBus
Naïvely believing that android-faced weirdo Mark Zuckerberg is somehow primarily interested in bringing people together, over and above making massive great stacks of filthy lucre, ChooseMyCar.com has decided that the Facebook entry would be a camper van, so that you can 'go on a road trip of a lifetime' with as many of your social media friends as possible. We mean, it *looks* pretty cool, to be fair, but as Covid-19 will no doubt dictate we can't see anyone 'face-to-face in person' ever again, and your 'sowsh meedja' friends will be too busy Instagramming the crap out of their dinner for the 15 billionth time to actually join you on an adventure, this idea hasn't really got any legs. Actually, it has six wheels instead.
Google: the GoogleGO
Looking as if the writer of the piece was rapidly running out of ideas (and enthusiasm) by this point, the GoogleGO neatly avoids the fact that Google was indeed working on a car (which became the Waymo project) and it looked nothing like this red-and-silver, Judge Dredd-type contraption. It's also strange that the GoogleGO isn't rendered in the tech giant's corporate colours of red, blue, green and yellow, and when the piece talks about Google Glass displaying maps and information for the driver, or the car receiving updates about your journey to help your travel run smoothly, then you realise that the person behind this idea has never heard of head-up displays in contemporary cars nor about over-the-air updates/live traffic management software either. Also, adding the line at the end that 'Google would also invest time into making sure its car was environmentally-conscious by making it electric or even carbon neutral' suggests a startling lack of foresight about where the automotive industry is heading anyway. And there's no mention of the GoogleGO having an 'Incognito' mode so that you can, er, look up things that might be 'NSFW'... ahem.