Burger King Whopper Of A Freeway Stunt Inspires Self-Driving Car On-The-Go Possibilities

Traffic on Los Angeles freeways is notorious for being stop-and-go, often trapping drivers in sluggish or at times an unmoving endless snarl of cars that are all vying for every cutthroat sought inch of progress they can make.

Driving a 20-mile commute at idealistic unimpeded freeway speeds should in-theory take around twenty to thirty minutes, yet the reality is that you can exasperatingly spend an hour to two hours trying to undertake such a relatively short-distance journey. Mostly, you are watching the bumper of a car ahead of you, typically just a few inches away, and the driver behind you is doing the same.

It is slow, pondering, agonizing, and frustrating when you know that your car can supposedly do zero to 60 in a few split seconds, yet your mechanical beast is being held back and kept to a slothful pace equivalent to a baby crawling along on all fours.

Hunger sometimes becomes an issue.

I was heading home from Burbank the other night and had planned on making a light supper in my kitchen. Caught in onerous backed-up traffic, this time especially egregious due to a multi-car pile-up of cars that had occurred hours before but that was still immersed in the mopping up stage, I could hear my own stomach growling incessantly for attention.

My mind was trying to tell my hunger urge to wait until getting home, unfortunately the hunger craving was overpowering my mental resolve to holdout. I had skipped lunch at work because, well, there frequently just isn’t time for lunch. My breakfast had been an energy bar and a bottled water, consumed during the morning commute to Burbank. Now, I was trapped in the middle of the freeway, had no food in the car, and was facing a lengthy delay getting to my food pantry.

I realize that starvation was not imminent, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be carping about my hunger. Let’s just agree that sometimes people while in their cars are bound to get hungry. Yes, I could have pulled off the freeway and done a drive-thru for some fast food, though I assure you that getting over to a freeway exit would have been a battle, plus the side streets were chocked with traffic, and then getting back onto the freeway would have been a tortuous wait since the entrance timers were on and timing car entries on an intermittent and eternity-long basis.

Traffic Jam Whopper To The Rescue

Burger King has found an answer to this stuck-in-traffic hunger problem, namely delivery of a combo meal of a burger, fries and a soda (or bottled water) directly to your car, while stranded in traffic jams.

After the famous restaurant chain had already tried this innovative service in Mexico City and found it successful, they are now aiming to do the same in Los Angeles, opting to call the new service The Traffic Jam Whopper.

Here’s how it works.

While driving in your car, you use a special mobile app on your smartphone to place your food order. The order is shunted to a nearby Burger King restaurant, which prepares your meal, and then a motorcyclist is dispatched to your location.

Your location is ascertained via the GPS coordinates provided by your smartphone, and the motorcyclist then attempts to find your car in the morass of vehicles on the freeway (the setup you provided has info such as the make and model, color, and other facets of your car). The motorcyclist pulls alongside your car, you open your car window, and the motorcyclist passes your bagged combo and drink to you. No need to pay the motorcyclist directly since the mobile app charges your credit card.

What makes this viable is that motorcyclists in California can do lane splitting, meaning that a motorcycle can go between lanes and weave its way throughout traffic. As such, in spite of enormous miles-long lines of cars, motorcyclists typically move ahead at a rapid clip (though, let’s be clear, this is a dicey activity, and I’ve seen many motorcyclists that landed head-first on the paved road as a result of a car suddenly shifting in a lane).

I’m guessing that many of you are right away decrying this notion of fast food delivery while in the middle of traffic as an unimaginable form of lunacy, or maybe even worse a potential new way for getting people killed. Some might say it is an “innovation” and invitation for injury and death, rather than being simply a novel means of fast food delivery.

Aren’t drivers already distracted enough?

Now, they need to be watching for additional motorcyclists, they need to be watching for cars that are trying to align with a motorcyclist and pass food between them, etc. It sure seems like this might produce even more bumper-to-bumper rear enders than we already have. The slower speeds of snarled traffic do make this less likely to lead to actual deaths, and presumably milder injuries, yet it still seems to smack the rails of sensibility the wrong way.

And, by the way, will this speed-up traffic (no, of course not!), so it is really a potential boon to making a lousy traffic situation even lousier. You might argue it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a person orders and gets their burger, slowing down traffic further, others get hungry due to the longer time in traffic, so they order a burger, and the cycle feeds upon itself. Clever for the fast food business!

If you are concerned that the driver placing such an order will be distracted, Burger King is so far indicating that the orders are placed only by voice command, thus the ordering driver does not have to apparently text and drive (texting is a no-no worthy of a hefty ticket in California), and the order itself is limited to the combo meal only, reducing any back-and-forth dialogue that might require further human attention.

Whether you are outraged at this service, or you find it amusing, or you are tempted to try it, I’m not going to further address herein the utility of it and will instead use it as a springboard for another related topic.

Upon the advent of self-driving driverless cars, you can expect that mid-traffic delivery between autonomous cars is likely to arise and become a somewhat popular activity.

Allow me to unpack that statement.

Self-Driving Cars And Coordinated On-Road Interactions

At some point in the future, we’ll presumably have truly autonomous cars on our public roadways, roaming freely and eventually becoming the predominant way of getting around (human driven cars gradually receding and no longer kept in use). Autonomous or driverless cars do not require and nor even allow for a human driver and instead are driven entirely and solely by an AI system.

To clarify, I’m not suggesting this advent is going to happen anytime soon, and I’ve repeatedly emphasized that we are a long way afar of such a day.

In any case, once we do reach that status, it does open the possibility of doing “tricky” driving that we today would generally find reprehensible in human based driving. Open your mind to a time when the ways of human drivers are no longer dominant.

Self-driving driverless cars will be employing V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications. This allows the AI systems of autonomous cars to electronically chat with each other. Trying to get one driverless car to rendezvous with another driverless car will be relatively easy to do, since they can both be communicating across an online network and be navigating toward each other.

I’ve written and spoken previously about the various new types of car caravans and motorcades that will be possible as a result of driverless cars. Whereas today it is usually arduous to try and coordinate a multitude of cars during their driving journey, the use of autonomous cars and coupled with V2V is going to make it a snap to do.

The Burger King example using human driven cars and human driven motorcycles is perhaps an earlier form of allowing for mid-traffic interactions among vehicles. Today, it certainly seems like a rather dicey proposition. With driverless cars, assuming they are otherwise safe to be on our roads, the added element of them coordinating and aligning with each other mid-traffic is not much of an added effort.

On a related topic, in an earlier piece I had discussed the aspect of upcoming capabilities of deliveries to the trunk of your car, an emerging service that would have packages placed into the trunk of your parked car, doing so while you are say at work and your car is sitting in a nearby parking lot. This is another kind of service that could be ratcheted up via autonomous cars, allowing a transfer of a package into another autonomous car, either while one is parked and stationary, or while both are underway and in traffic.

Of course, such driverless cars would need to be designed to accommodate these kinds of in-motion transfers.

The trunk that you know of today might be differently shaped and opened, allowing for a slot into which a package could be inserted, and the slot or door then closed to keep the package inside. This could also be a means to deliver fast food, entering into the slot, and then moved into the body of the autonomous car where the passengers are sitting.

In the case of the Burger King delivery, there needs to be a human in the car to receive the fast food. With driverless cars, it could be that your autonomous car picks up your food for you, while on an errand, not even needing to swing into a fast food eatery, and instead gets the fast food while on-the-go and then brings it to you at home or work.

This also dovetails into my piece describing tryouts underway by Uber of delivering McDonald’s fast food via autonomous drones, doing so by delivering initially to human driven cars and then later on progressing to doing so to autonomous cars. A driverless car might allow for vehicle-to-vehicle transfers, along with drone-to-car transfers.

In case you are wondering about the motorcyclist aspects, perhaps puzzled about whether humans will be riding motorcycles in the midst of droves of driverless cars, though it is conceivable that humans will still be able to ride their motorcycles in such situations, there is also work underway to create driverless motorcycles.

Thus, it is probably more likely that a future equivalent to the Burger King effort would consist of a delivery by a driverless motorcycle to a driverless car, and into the hands of a human or humans inside the autonomous car, or the food would be carted by the driverless car to wherever the ordering human resides.

Conclusion

I don’t want to leave you with an impression that the mid-traffic and in-motion transfer operations are going to be error free, even in an era of predominantly autonomous vehicles.

There are still chances of things going awry. There will be risks of the vehicles having something go wrong at the wrong moments, and there is always the chance of say debris on the roadway that could foul-up such operations.

Meanwhile, I suppose we’ll need to see how the human version of mid-traffic and in-motion transfers plays out.

It also makes one wonder, if your stomach is growling and you just have to eat something, do you think that you could flag that fast food motorcyclist coming past you to transfer the food to your car, instead of the ordering car, perhaps for a really generous tip?

Maybe that’s not proper mid-traffic in-motion transfer etiquette (what would Miss Manners espouse?).