During the great all-analog, all-human version of Mattel football which was played for one yesterday mixed crowd of people and cardboard cutouts of people, a number of car manufacturers paid a lot of money to earn small, tacky movies which they hoped would trigger a chain of events that would end with the purchase of a car. Cadillac’s entry was for them upcoming Lyriq electric SUV, and featured the son of one of the modern cultures most famous art people with cutlery at hand. It also added to the potentially dangerous misinformation all around current level 2 driver assistance systems.
If you haven’t had a chance to view the Cadillac ad, please. I think I can just bill GM to show this here? I’ll look at that:
Now, before we get into the automotive issues here, if you’re somewhat familiar with Tim Burton’s 1990 movie Edward Scissorhands, you will see that a lot is wrong here.
The main character there, the one who looks almost exactly like the titular (creepy) Edward from the original movie, is in fact Edgar Scissorhands, implied to be the son of the original Edward, the knife-invented man who took hair and makeup advice from Bob Smith of the Cure.
The mother is implied in the same way as Winona Ryder’s unusually blonde character from the original, Kim, and that’s where things get confusing because by the end of the original movie, Kim had helped falsify Edwards’s death and seemingly onward living . full of life close by but without any real contact with him.
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See, it’s all here at the end of the movie:
So here’s someone lying. Now if we say okay what difference, it’s just a commercial, so let’s say Kim and Edward did coming together and having a son, that also raises all kinds of questions.
Remember, Edward was built by an inventor to be a kind of android, an inventor who made remarkably poor decisions about what kind of temporary mechanical hands would prove most useful until a truly human-like pair was completed:
Those complicated, dangerous multi-bladed hands turned out to be some kind of awful choice, but the inventor was clearly very skilled: Edward wasn’t just a high-functioning entity with near-human emotions and cognitive abilities but, if we are to believe this Cadillac commercial, did it have a fully functioning human reproductive system? With sperm that somehow contained the DNA information for mechanical scissor hands?
And if that’s true, I hope Kim Scissorhands had a cesarean section. Based on the child’s anatomy, that might have been the only possible outcome, possibly initiated by the child? There are all kinds of troubling problems here.
But again, it’s just an advertisement. Fine. We see in the ad that although Edgar is clearly proficient with his scissor hands, he has a lot of trouble operating many basic human tools and equipment: pulling cords on buses, catching footballs, pushing buttons, fences, etc.
Now we see him nervously driving the Lyriq. He seems to have some sort of human hands underneath all those knives, but when it comes to a task where we would pick a finger by pressing a button, he does select a large knife to do the job:
At this point it is SuperCruise system takes over, and because it uses a camera to track the driver’s eyes to confirm that due attention is being paid to the road, which is different from systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, which use a torque sensor in the steering wheel to confirm that one hand is on the wheel.
Now, the message being sent here is pretty straightforward, and it’s the part that I have a problem with: GM says that even if you have huge collections of knives on hand that make normal driving nearly impossible, it’s okay because SuperCruise means you you don’t even have to touch the wheel!
The problem here is that, like all level 2 driver assistance systems, even if you don’t have to touch the steering wheel or the car controls while it’s working, it can still stop working and require the driver to take over without warning, and if this happened to Edgar up there at highway speeds, I think it would end with some rattling and fumbling at best, and at worst with geysers of hot blood spraying from everyone in the front seat and probably some scratched LCDs and cracked alacantara.
You also saw the door handles on the Lyriq? Edgar does not open it in any way. And if he tries, that paint job is boned.
This commercial just plays on the myth, the same myth that feeds Tesla with terms like “Automatic pilot“And”Completely self-propelled“That level 2 driver assistance systems are autonomous, self-driving systems. They are not.
As we’ve said before, Level 2 systems are inherently flawed, not for technological reasons, but for human brain reasons: people are just not good at these kinds of ‘vigilance tasks’ and anything that requires people to take over without notice or warning has deep-seated problems.
This commercial is cute enough and would be ideal for a system of level 3 or higher that sort of failover / elegant transfer system in place, but it doesn’t.
Cadillac hasn’t solved that problem, and neither has Tesla. While Cadillac’s camera system for observing the camera may be harder to fool than Tesla’s, if you have massive scissors all over your hands you’ll still have just as much trouble driving a car, though you might discover thanks to SuperCruise you have problems at much higher speeds and much further from where you started, so that’s a thing.
Knee-teeth or not, commercials like this all lead the non-auto-geek audience to the belief that autonomy is beyond it, and that’s a recipe for trouble.
Do the Scissorhands men also have skin under their leather? Or is Which the skin?