He could be dead, actually. I imagine a modern adaptation of "The headless horseman": a murdered driver rides in his electric vehicle, self-charging on charging stations and automatically riding between the locations frequented by the deceased owner. ...
See the short story "Road Stop" by David Mason, published 1963.
The car called the Traveler, rolling at the stately thirty miles an hour it
always held, was coming down the road now, and the two men stood, watching. The
woman, a little behind them, watched too, her face growing whiter. No one said
anything as the old fashioned car rolled by, straight and steady down the
highway, holding the center of the lane as sharply as it always did.
There was a film of dust inside the windows, though the Traveler was clean and
shining outside. But the film did hide the white bone faces, the despairing
hands that had long ago stopped trying to break through those closed windows.
The dead driver, his slumped body having fallen toward an "Accept" button on the car's touch screen just as an offer to drive for Uber appeared, now makes $200,000 / year going non-stop without bathroom or sleep breaks.
Oh what a beautiful idea for a short story. Would have been a great writing prompt over in the redditverse probably.
[Edit:]
Could be a crime novel. A classical who-dun-it, but with the need to trackback the route and stuff like this and things happening in between and the data of the car being tampered with or stuff like this.
There's a powerful sci fi short story I read in an anthology quite a while ago (I believe called The Flying Dutchman) describing a crewless bomber being repaired, fueled, taking off, bombing its target, landing, and then doing the same thing again. As it describes this repetition, you slowly realize that humanity has long since been wiped out and the bombing runs are automated systems repeating themselves. (That's my memory of the story, anyhow, I read it in the 80's :) ).
(Edit: found it, "Flying Dutchman" by Ward Moore, it's from the 50's and you can find its text online with those terms)
Thanks for linking these! They indeed capture that same concept and are quite beautiful, in a haunting sense. In this case automated technology seems to inhabit the same space as ghosts in a non-sci-fi setting. At least the type of ghost that re-enacts some event over and over. (The title of the short story I mentioned is an overt reference to one of those stories). I wonder what added meaning the technological element conveys, e.g. the difference between a story about ghostly sailors re-entering naval combat ad infinitum vs. a story about robotic pilots continuing a physical war patterned by their long dead designers. Both are a form of haunting.
It could work if the car had gone on enough trips, it wasn't clear which one was the important one. Maybe someone is sending the car out every day to hide their tracks.
This actually happens more often than, I think, people think about. It makes sense when you stop and realize what percentage of their lives Americans spend in their cars (like the old rule "most accidents happen in the home," with an average daily one-way commute of 27.6 minutes, most Americans spend 2.9% of their lives in their cars, so all else being equal 2.9% of medical emergencies can be expected to happen in cars).
I don't have high-quality numbers, but a low-quality Google search tosses out that 20% of accidents are caused by a participant having a medical emergency and losing control of their vehicle (grain-of-salt: the number is from an injury law firm, so obvious incentive to bias the number).
I would expect fewer medical emergencies in a car than in some other settings. But people who've had a medical emergency are likely to get into a car to head to the hospital, and can then run into serious trouble.
In particular it is common for people suspect that they may be having a heart attack, try to drive to the hospital, and then lose control on the way.
This happens enough that standard advice from medical professionals for potential heart attack victims includes tips like, "Survive. Don't drive!" If you've got worrying symptoms, call 9-1-1 and NOT attempt to drive. See https://www.valleyhealthlink.com/blog/2017/february/survive-... for a random example.
That said, the average ambulance ride in California is close to $600. So people have a strong incentive to try to avoid the ambulance, no matter how bad an idea that may be.
It would be interesting to know what portion of medical events happen in a car. So many things are less likely (eg whole driving you aren’t using a knife to cut up dinner, or cleaning leaves out the gutter), but so many are worse (eg if you are going 100kmh and you faint).
Only if "has medical emergencies" is independent from "drives to work." My guess is more medical emergencies happen in hospitals than on the road, even though the average person spends a lot less time in the hospital than on the road.
I'm not up to date on solar power, but my bullshit detector is going off quite a bit. My understanding is that solar power charges very slowly per area unit. Intuition says you can maybe drive (not super fast) for 30 min after charging for a sunny. Would like to be wrong.
