4 thoughts on “Teslas are advanced but very glitchy”

  1. I saw a video of a mom and son driving her Tesla from California to Tennessee only using the self-drive feature.

    It worked well for them about 90% of the time. A few times the GPS sent them on a circuitous route to get somewhere unless they took over.

    But I would take Herbie, too–as long as I stay on his good side.

  2. One time when I was a boy, after we’d moved away from L.A. but we were back there for some reason, I was at a hotdog place called Zups By the Zoo, in Glendale, near the apartment where my mother and I had lived when I was five. Zups was across from a triangular park of sycamore trees and grass, near a fence that kept people from going down into the L.A. River. A movie company had cleared the four-lane street for a shot. That VW, or one of its stand-ins, came tearing around the curve and bounced into the air on a plywood ramp, followed by a bigger, more boxy car. They sent everything back the other way to do it again.

    Another time I was in L.A. after that, I remember going past a triangular space between the freeway and an off-ramp, where were several No. 53 Herbie cars stored there in various states of completeness, some of them just the body, I guess for one of the sequels to The Love Bug, the only one of the series that I saw.

    Memory interests me. I know for a fact I haven’t thought of that car or that movie franchise or anything related to it for decades. Seeing the car’s picture just now brings loads of memories up out of the depths, everything branching off in all directions. The VW bus I had and rebuilt the motor of with my friend Dan. My grandfather working in a hotdog place for something to walk to and do once he retired. A boxing gym with trampolines in it where I waited, jumping around, and reading, and jumping around some more, while my mother worked someplace she couldn’t take me along, right up the street from St. Francis Church, where I often sat simply waiting for it to be over, looking at bleeding Jesus and sleepy Mary and candles, and women’s hats, and the concrete stone and the colored glass, counting things and parts of things. A light fixture store my mother used as a lending library to temporarily fix up houses she sold for a real estate company and then she’d take the lights down and return them. A maraschino cherry in a glass of 7-up. The decorative pumice landscaping rocks I dumped into the apartment’s pool to make an asteroid field when I discovered they float. The horrible texture of bathing suits of the time. The little dog we had that I chased after all the way into the park when she figured out how to open the porch gate. The Capitol Records building. Griffith Park Observatory. I’m stopping here, but it’s just a flood of material that flows out of a picture of a car. And everything is like that, probably, eventually, for everyone, almost.

  3. I trust Herbie. He got you where you were going, and he foiled the bad guys.
    I know of no other car that actively foils the bad guys

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