AV: adult video, autonomous vehicle or both?
It was inevitable, but it has still caused a stir – a couple have filmed a sex tape while travelling in a Tesla Model X in Autopilot mode on a US highway.
Media outlets across the globe reported that amateur porn star Taylor Jackson, of Los Angeles, performed the dangerous deed with her boyfriend and posted it on adult site PornHub.
She then took to Twitter to inform Tesla boss Elon Musk: “Holy shit, I made @Tesla the #1 search on pornhub.”
While Tesla warns all its drivers to “stay alert, drive safely and be in control of the vehicle at all times”, Musk couldn’t resist commenting: “Turns out there’s more ways to use Autopilot than we imagined… shoulda seen it coming…”
Two people who did predict it were UK academics Scott Cohen, of the University of Surrey, and Debbie Hopkins, of the University of Oxford.
In their 2018 paper Autonomous vehicles and the future of urban tourism, they noted: “While shared connected and autonomous vehicles (SCAVs) will likely be monitored to deter passengers having sex or using drugs in them, and to prevent violence, such surveillance may be rapidly overcome, disabled or removed.
“Moreover, personal CAVs will likely be immune from such surveillance. Such private CAVs may also be put to commercial use, as it is just a small leap to imagine Amsterdam’s Red Light District on the move.”
The development is also a blow for the acronym AV in the driverless world.
Already facing stiff completion from CASE (connected, autonomous, shared and electric), SDC (self-driving car) and others, it must now contend with adult video being a related search term.
