It’s quite frightening, but they are being serious.
This article reports that blind people were put behind the wheel of manual cars on a test track in Cologne. For some inexplicable reason, it is deemed boastworthy that the fastest one of these blind drivers got the car “up to 74mph”.
The article suggests:
Teaching the blind to drive is an increasingly realistic goal as cameras and sensors become sophisticated and cheap enough that they might one day substitute for sight.
The rough translation of this is as follows: having cameras and computers reliable enough to be a substitute for sight is many, many years off – even if it happens at all.
Ford apparently saw the event as “empowering blind and visually impaired drivers”.
I remember once someone reported that blind people were being taught to drive with the aid of a guide dog in the passenger seat, which was trained to bark once for “turn left” and twice for “turn right”.
The number of people who believed it was amazing. It was published on April 1st.