"Trailer. Unpaired."

"NOOOO"

The print spooler is basically the Typhon Expanse. You send a bunch of print jobs that disappear, and when you walk down there to see what the fuck is up some ancient print job pops out like Kelsey Grammer wearing the ancient Star Fleet uniform with the stack-of-coffee-filters collar.

Answer: Linux. My Windows machines jist fucking hate printers, I often have to delete and reinstall jist to get them to work. My Bazzite machine; "Sure, coming right up. Btw, you haven't restarted your machine in 70 days, you really need to install updates."

It seems to me that the use-case for this technique is freight hauling, where a series of trailers follow a single, human-driven truck, thereby skirting the law and reducing payroll. And, once again, the techbros have re-invented trains, but worse.

All for what, less wear on your main vehicle

Absurd

It also needs enough ballast for the whole thing not to become unstable, which also lowers efficiency if it's not itself carrying passengers or cargo.

While that was my first thought, it might actually be useful in the "I rarely tow anything" category.. like a Uhaul rental. So you don't need to actually OWN the towing dongle. Or a car with that much power. You just rent it when you need it.

Which honestly would be nice... we've got too many people who own massive gas guzzlers just for that one or two times a year they need to use it for its intended purpose.

I saw this picture many years ago already, so I don't think that's happening anymore...

I imagine people would rent these, not buy them. And it would mean you didn't need a car rated to tow whatever trailer you have.

good and bad news, simultaneous: No one can have hitchless towing until patent expiration: 17 years from then, afaik.

A trailer that can respond and assist a hard brake

we already have that, and it's legally required for trailers above a specific weight in many places

I presume the concept is "you have need to tow a 5,000 pound trailer and you just have your Toyota Corolla"

To provide effective towing, your vehicle has to be rugged, powerful, and weigh enough to not get yanked around by your load, meaning even when not towing it's a heavy vehicle. Instead this imagines a self-driving, passengerless truck that plays follow the leader and hopes it's close enough to towing to be allowed.

Of course, the problem as illustrated is that they show a tiny little thing towing a big payload. The physics just doesn't work (I suppose if the trailer is hollow aluminum and the tow is lead...)

If I had to guess. Its because "hitches are ugly."

Why did we skip past cool tech and go straight to idiocy.

We didn't skip past cool tech. We plucked a bunch of low hanging fruit. And now that fruit is gone. So we're getting weird with it to justify further consumer spending.

Guys sliding into the DMs with a "Watch this one neat trick where I disable your wifi" when wifi is so unreliable that nobody will notice.

If the trailer had some steering/drive, ok. This illustrated concept of a "detached hitch" has some physics problems, since the trailer is just going to yank that thing all over the place.

A Prius can tow like 700 kg if you put a hitch on it, almost the limit for a B class license.

Think it was an "indulge the stupid executives dumb idea so he can say "innovation".

Another large purchase to foist onto consumers who opt out of the truck market, but fantasize about using this machine to haul stuff all over town.

"Towing" with a small car that couldn't otherwise is the only reason I can think of.

Still dumb, but it's something

Look up the towing capacity of a mid sized SUV. They can't tow shit, you basically need a pickup to tow anything over 1500lbs. That's only a small Uhaul 5x8 trailer.

It means you don't have to put some ugly hitch on your Tesla.

Also, how is some tiny little robot thing going to habe the juice to pull a fucking trailer?