Not sure if it’s common elsewhere, but many gas stations around my area have screen on the pump that play obnoxiously loud ads while you’re pumping gas. Most of them have a mute button at least.
At the station by my house somebody used a label maker to label the mute button on all the pumps. I assume an employee who was tired of hearing the ads or hearing customers complain about the ads.
> Not sure if it’s common elsewhere, but many gas stations around my area have screen on the pump that play obnoxiously loud ads while you’re pumping gas. Most of them have a mute button at least.
One of the many, MANY jarring things about going to the US. I jam my gas-gap filler cap in the handle and go check the oil so I can get as far away from that nonsense as possible.
All the gas pump handles I've used have a thingy that you can flip down to hold the trigger in place so you can let go and they will keep pumping. I've only pumped gas in Washington, California, and at a station that was on a Native American reservation in Oregon. Are there states where gas pumps don't have support hands free pumping?
Some of them play the ads somewhat constantly. Really freaked me out the first couple times I walked to my local grocery store with a gas station at 5 AM, then suddenly heard someone loudly talking behind me.
Every camera I see gets the finger. Especially when I'm at Kroger / Fry's / Ralphs / Dillons and there's no manned cashier and I need to use the self-checkout.
In the USA the last couple times I've had to use uber/lyft, there have been touch screen tablets with ads and games at max brightness in the back seat, strapped to the back of the front seats. At night it's blinding.
I went there a few months ago and around 80% of the cabs I took had ads. There also was a power off button accessible with a few taps in all of them (which my friends and I committed to muscle memory pretty quickly)
To get from point A to point B I would assume. Id be way more concerned about someone getting in to shoot up and OD'ing in there. Instead of getting a taxi you end up with a dead body delivery.
Sounds like, "what else are you going to do on a 12hr flight. Of course you should watch porn and jackoff in your seat".
I'd just post the videos in public. The riders will hopefully get fired from their jobs as their employeer's can't handle the controversy and quickly people will learn that sex is a robotaxis is sex in public and learn to behave.
I have no problem if you buy your own level 5 car and have sex in it. I have a much bigger problem with people having sex in shared vehicles that are not cleaned between riders.
People take taxis when they are drunk. People are more likely to engage in sex while drunk. People take taxis when they want a degree of privacy as they travel, as opposed to busses. People are more likely to have sex when in a semi-private space. A taxi provides a degree of physical security, a barrier between you and the mob. Why is this a surprise? In SF I expect that some taxi startup will soon target this market directly.
I don't take taxi for the privacy but because public transports suck in Paris at night. Past 2AM the metro doesn't works, the train to Versailles (next to where I live) doesn't work, the bus to my city also doesn't works.
The second biggest issue when taking public transport while drunk, is sleeping and missing your stop.
Slightly related, but found it interesting that the main image on what is at least semi-purported to be a news article is a midjourney AI image (though kudos to the article for clearly identifying this).
Stock photo businesses are deaaaaad.
Edit: though if you look at it the actual configuration of this "back seat of the taxi" in this image is completely bizarre.
If the two of you are having an affair, you can take the whole $250 hotel room and 30 minutes’ drive each way/each person and replace it with a $20 driverless taxi and literally get the entire sordid experience delivered to your door.
The “I don’t think that’ll be a thing” is adorable, like people thinking hotels that rent by the hour are geared toward people who just need a couple hours of sleep.
I see this blurring the lines between OnlyFans and transportation- get the transport service for free in exchange for the footage. Unless you’re terrible to watch, then it’s merely discounted.
If people watch Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, why wouldn’t they pay to watch this?
Lots of people have affairs with people that they can see professionally, or openly in a platonic setting. So the only part of the relationship that has to be really hidden is the intimacy.
Personally though I think people will still choose hotels over the back problems that come with doing it in the backseat like a teenager.
Thankfully (?) Cruise is already deploying their L4/5 pod vehicles, that don't have a front drivers seat, so it's more of a cabin and less like the back seat of a car.
> Maybe it'll be a little higher than 'sex in regular cars' but I doubt it'll be measurable.
It's going to be super measurable and that's why there's already an article about it: if you're two in a regular car, with one person driving, you can't really have sex (it's doable I guess but dangerous and illegal).
Now if you're three in a regular car, with a driver, the two that could have sex typically wouldn't (for privacy reasons: they don't want to do it next to the driver, except in some cases).
I don't doubt that some regular cab drivers had people having sex in their taxi but I'm willing to bet that 99% of the time when they take two people, these two people aren't having sex.
Lustified horny people have never broken the law in pursuit of having sex.
There's a video on pornhub of a couple having sex in a full self driving Tesla and Elon Musk even commented on it! I guess the question is, does road head count as "sex"?
Amusing little article while this is still a novel service. If this is actually happening, it will stop almost immediately because the combination of passenger-facing cameras and non-anonymous rides will get you barred for life.
> “It was really funny because [the Cruise] got quite hot and fogged up to the point that the windshield was completely fogged over — in any other context, in any other vehicle, that would be an actual problem,”
Hahahahaha. So on the one hand this is a (somewhat?) positive article, even if it's looking for trouble. In that it's normalizing the self-driving car. It's taking it as a given and writing about something else. That's intesting in showing acceptance.
On the other hand, the developers are then going all "we are actively working to put a stop to that". This is why we can't have nice things.
There was a guy that started a mobile sex-box-truck in the Bay Area a few years ago - you could pay to have it pick you up and drive around while you have sex in the back while he drove around...
Now, with robotaxis you dont need to worry about the driver - but how many cams are in the cab of the robotaxi
Well, this is unofficial "option" of older taxis. I've few times hear, that for some not too large amount of money, driver could allow couple to stay alone in taxi for few minutes.
Well, the woman in the article said it was exciting because it felt wrong, so I guess it’s going along with that idea in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
It's gross for two reasons I think (not saying I necessarily relate to them): 1) communicable diseases, e.g. crabs., and 2) if someone has to maintain cleanliness for any religious purpose.
For some Abrahamic religions (I am not sure about Christianity), being clean and being pure are distinct concepts. There are cases when one can be pure, but unclean/dirty and vice versa; having sex fluids on you is a case of being both (depending on your hygiene preferences). If it's just you or partners fluids, then one may not count that towards unclean, but it wouldn't be "clean" for a religious thingy.
They'll probably eventually get shittified like everything else and refuse to move if you're not staring at ads in the cabin.