Jockey-less Racing

[robert99]

Due to the engineering brilliance of Stanford Professor, Sebastian Thrun, the State of Nevada has approved driver-less cars onto their highways. California, where a test car has covered 140,000 miles without causing an accident may follow suit.
In UK, the largely hidden scandal of some 3500 folks a year dieing on our roads could be greatly reduced with this innovation. No more falling asleep, phone calls whilst driving, excessive speed, drunk or drug effected driving, nor anti-social lane swapping. Tiny insurance payments, less strain on hospital emergency units, less road closures and the reduction of the hugely economically wasteful car repair industry, perhaps?

In times of austerity and reduced racing income could this concept come to mean having driver-less racing ie no human jockeys. Would the absence of interviews full of multiple meaningless clichés and conducting races with little sense of pace also mean the end of the moronic "gave it a good/bad ride" and the armchair "bent" jockey brigade?

A good thing or a bad thing?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/g … -road.html

[Purwell]

There are robot jockeys aren’t there?

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highways

[sberry]

What’s the point of driver-less cars? When you’re getting the sack for non-attendance the excuse "but my car was in on time" will get you nowhere.

Anyway, horses can be trained to throw races, it would be even worse.

[Bachelors Hall]

This did happen once upon a time in Bosnia under Austro-Hungarian rule… albeit partially;-

Stud-farms were established, and, to encourage pride in horse-breeding, race-courses were made at Ilidža and Prijedor. (The races, which became very popular, were not at first conducted under Jockey Club rules: ‘They rode barebacked, and as they neared the winning post they threw themselves off in order to lighten their horses, which raced in by themselves.’

The practice was stopped because of the number of severe injuries it caused to the jockeys.

[Author]

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