Everyone Hates Apple’s Self-Driving, Windowless, VR-Enabled Car Idea

According to VR Scout, Apple has filed a patent for a windowless self-driving car. If that sounds terrifying, just wait, it gets worse. The car—which is one of a number of self-driving car patents filed by the company—reportedly also has a virtual reality function, which, among other things, can let passengers look at the scenery around them via cameras on the outside of the car.

The VR setup will supposedly help with motion sickness, although speaking as someone who gets overcome with nausea, claustrophobia, and vertigo within two minutes of putting on a VR headset for the most basic game, let alone realistic high-speed road travel, I don’t know how that can be even remotely possible.

The image VR Scout tweeted (via Letsgodigital and Concept Creator) is horrifying:

Unsurprisingly, people are not fans!

Recently, Elon Musk introduced an incredibly disappointing reinvention of tunnels capable of low-impact, low-speed travel, and now Apple is apparently offering their own disappointing version of a similar mode of transport. It would be really nice if at least one billionaire was willing to invest in reasonably plausible—let alone miraculously transformative—improvements to existing infrastructure but at least for now, we have the tweets.

(image: PonyWang/Getty Images with edits)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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