Parallels of Disaster
I don't actually understand why anyone would want this, but hey, I've got no right to say what's desirable for people. Hell, according to my wife I don't understand anything fun. It's why she wouldn't let me buy a downtown parking garage and convert it into a low maintenance, easily defended home that you could also drive around in without tearing up the parquet floors like a golf cart inside a regular house. She doesn't know shit about fun.
I digress, I may not understand the consumer appeal, but I have an exhaustive, and comprehensive, body of experience why things like this are terrible for manufacturers, of anything. It's because the only difficult part about any business with a wide audience are the customers. Customers are like a prostate exam, you've got to have at least one every so often, but that doesn't mean they don't also suck.
They don't suck out of malice (usually) or even stupidity (sometimes). It's the fact that you have to produce something that does one thing well enough (like drive, in a car example) but add in 17,513.4 other trivial things that are nearly indestructible but have no real instructions for use and care and nobody to read them even if instructions were included. In my opinion, cars and software UI's represent the ultimate challenges in all categories of design, but I'll stay on cars.
Think about it, if you ignore the driving part, almost every single aspect of operating every system in a car is an organic societal function. A person might take driving lessons, more probably should, but nobody is going to ask you how to roll down a window unless your car is really weird, 'everybody' knows how to do that. Observational learning is why child safety locks and windows on the rear doors weren't enough. It took little Billy about five seconds to determine he could still open the door by reaching the outside handle. So now some rear windows barely open wide enough to flip someone off for driving too close.
Anyway, 'everybody' knows how car systems work, but 11 different people will interact with the door handles 11 different ways. Same with every other system. Because something only performs its primary function one way does not mean secondary functions cannot exist. Prime example: The Traveling Salesman (the actual people, not the systems problem).
They're kind of rare today, but not too long ago you would regularly see people with an entire clothiers inventory hanging on a closet rod suspended by the interior pull handles above the rear doors. At no point did anyone anticipate those shitty little handles would be used to hang 500lbs of wool suits. In fact, in passenger cars (not trucks & SUV's) those handles are specifically designed so that unless you have an extra arm, or a wrist that bends opposite of everyone else, you can't actually put the full weight of a human on them.
But hanging all your clothes like that was the life of the traveling sales droid. Needless to say, many of those handles were torn down by 200 sheep worth of wool in sudden braking situations. Now we've got angry customers with a massive territory to spread their message of hate because the handles broke.
I use this example because Vovlo, preferred automobile choice of US based sales droids, had a real problem. The design of the cars prevented using a deeper anchor for the handles, so in later models a new rail was added to the roof and an all new, less attractive, interior roof panel, plus the millions in new tooling and new assembly protocols.
That was a stupidly long way to say that manufacturers would be idiots to put drones in cars. It is absolutely guaranteed to be insanely expensive to deal with all the dumb shit people will do with it. And make no mistake about it, it will be the fault of the manufacturer when somebody launches their car off a cliff and the drone fails to carry the car. Or when little Billy attaches his new little sister to the drone and launches them both out the window while traveling down the DC Beltway.
Sure, the manufacturers may win the lawsuits, but that doesn't mean you don't have to pay millions to deal with them and millions more trying to educate consumers without calling the fucking idiots fucking idiots. So very much of the costs of things like cars and buildings are down to idiot proofing. We design and produce test rigs for an unbelievable array of products and they aren't cheap. The fact that those things are even needed is definitive proof that stupid people are an unnecessary burden on the not stupid parts of society. It makes everything cost too much and even though we make a lot of money using advanced technology to out stupid stupid people, I would much rather be using all these super clever people to continue work on my ThinkTank - Theater Scale Market Incursion and Mobile Capitalism Command Vehicle (powered by AdWords if talks with Google go well).