Cruise is marketed all wrong

Cruise is marketed as a novelty. A fun new thing for your car.

It needs to be marketed as a seatbelt. You’d be reckless not to have it on.

Parents would be crazy to let their children ride in the car without wearing their seatbelts. That sounds like irresponsible parenting to me.

Likewise, to justify the $10,000 Cruise device price tag, it needs to be seen like insurance, or like buying the safest car; not having it means gambling.

One amazing disconnect in the world at the moment is how dangerous cars are versus how dangerous people perceive them to be. People fear flying, but driving to the airport is more dangerous. I feel humanity is in a bit of a fingers-in-our-ears situation on the dangers of driving, because of two things: it’s something that just needs to happen for you to make a living, and you feel that you are in control of it yourself, so you feel you can always do the right thing. Despite what the statistics keep telling us.

This stuff is horrifying and life changing in a few seconds, and often out of your control, even if you’re the best driver. And that’s if you’re not one of the almost 2/3rds of people who text while driving. Take one of the most life threatening activities you do every day, and don’t pay attention to the safety of it, because someone asked you a question via text. That makes sense.

Cruise needs to position itself, at least after the first early adopter easy sells, as the “safety harness” of cars. You wouldn’t go climbing without your harness, and so you wouldn’t get behind the wheel of a car without the car looking out for you. It’s just a bad decision. But until the societal feeling shift happens to make you feel like that’s a bad decision, people will keep doing it. And that shift hasn’t ever happened before, because there hasn’t been a harness before.

Every reporter still keeps saying “ooh I’m a little scared” before they try out any form of self driving car. Once the mentality shifts from it being a strange new thing, to it being something that is seen as dangerous not to use, then even $3,000 seems cheap as an add-on to an existing car. What price can you put on the safety of your family? What’s the number one danger to the safety of your family? Just get the harness.

That shift in mindset will happen. In 15 years it will seem so funny that some cars still don’t have any safety system in them, just like how we now laugh at old cars that have no seatbelts and no crumple zones.

And in 30 years it’ll seem absolutely incredible that for the first 100 years of cars, people were allowed to manually control a 2-tonne killing machine. “You mean you had to turn the big wheel right if you wanted to go right, at the exact right time?” “Yep, and if you didn’t, you crashed.”

It’s just a shame that the texting and cellphone selfie distraction revolution happened 15 years before cars drove themselves.