#disaster

Graduate students from the University of Michigan are currently engaged in a twisted role-playing game, where they attempt to cope with the media backlash following various failures of self-driving cars. The exercise is intended to help them understand the pitfalls associated with autonomous tech and how to best respond when it goes terribly awry — something automakers will also have to go through as self-driving vehicles become more prevalent.

Broken into teams of four, 30 groups across the Ann Arbor campus were confronted with a pretend automated tragedy last night. The details were delivered to them in much the same way they would have been to a real manufacturer: through phone calls, emails, social media, and in-person meetings.

They have until tonight to mitigate the fallout from the incident, generating business solutions in a faux 24-hour news cycle.

Your humble author came to love the W-body Impala relatively late in the game. TTAC was deliberately left off the list for 2014 Impala press drive invites, presumably to make more room for the Jen Friels and AutoBosses of the world. However, if what we’re reading in other sources is in any way legitimate, my advice to buy the old one while you still can appears to have been approximately as prescient as Paul Atreides was in Dune Messiah.

Perhaps the most surprising review comes from a source not normally known for harsh words regarding new cars.

Apparently.