Perspective
Self-Driving Cars Take a Turn Toward the Villainous, in Movies and Real Life
The comedy The Naked Gun isn’t the first film to tap our anxieties around driverless cars. But there’s a big difference this time.
“The Naked Gun” star Liam Neeson inspects the film’s fictional Tesla-like self-driving car. (In real life, it’s a lightly disguised Hyundai)
Credit: Paramount Pictures
It’s one of the most common tropes of police procedurals. A couple of detectives, coffee cups in hand, come upon a mangled car at the foot of a cliff. The dead driver is surrounded by conspicuously placed pill bottles; there are no skid marks on the road above.
But this caper is different. There was no brick on the gas pedal, no push over the ledge from a gang of mobsters. The killer, it turns out, was the car itself.