Not most children, but if a rich shareholder needs a transplant, the car has a database of matching people who are organ donors or who's parents believe in organ donation and will make subtle attempts to accidentally run them over. (A joke but fuck it maybe not at this point)

I can see the theoretical benefit, but yeah, I wouldn't trust it.

If you're a person with a car with no hauling capabilities, and no one to borrow a truck or van from, this should be a nice solution.

But yeeeaaaah, no thanks.

Fuck it. Why not just get a little steering wheel and a little person to drive your little tow truck behind you? No need to worry about losing Wi-Fi signal.

I like trains

This is actually almost environmentally motivated. Instead of driving a pickup truck because you need to pull a trailer for your once a year road trip, you get a self driving tow to follow your fuel efficient compact car.

bus enter the chat

"hey guys, I know yall hate me because poor people can use me but it seems like this whole self driving car thing isn't working out because it requires an absurd amount of new technology to work perfectly..... you know if you just put a moderate amount of money into me I could solve most mass transit problems right?"

mob of angry suburban karens swarm the bus, light it on fire and tip it over

Solution is that the trailer will tailgate you all the time. It'll also flash its beams if you don't go 10mph above the limit.

Because of the millisecond reaction time of the powerful processor, there is no way this could go wrong.

Yeah, the tensile strength of Wi-Fi is way too low to tow anything larger than a jet ski. You'll need at least some vhf 5G CBRS to tow a camper.

Eh, even If it does, it shouldn't be a problem. Relying on a wireless link that could fail due to interference or jamming for actual control would be Musk-level insane.

The hitchbot would need to be capable of visually following the lead vehicle, possibly using something like a big QR code for identification and tracking.

The wireless link could be for telemetry like range and non-critical controls like "stay here" and "start following".

If the link fails, you get a big warning to stop ASAP but the bot keeps following.

One asshole with a radio jammer targeting WiFi bands will cause an accident. This could be exploitable by nation state actors in specific scenarios if this gained popularity. Bad bad idea and should be discouraged. Towing should be physical-driven with interconnecting hardware.

Eh, a year and a half ago I caught a guy on a bike using a brute force car opener up and down a street near the job site I was on. Basically the device spits out every key fob door open code on a list until the car opens, or possibly it goes through known permutations used by various companies. What I know for sure is he had a small laptop and a USB antenna and was stopping at every car for a few minutes opening the ones he got, and moving on from the ones he didn't. Caught a decent video of his face and what he was doing for the police before he made off on his bike.

Few thousand? You basically have to buy most of an entire car as your hitch, including the most expensive parts like the engine or the motor and battery. This will be a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Maybe it's a bandwidth thing?