Donnie Darko meme with the text "or is it just trains again"/"just trains again"
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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This has literally zero benefit.
The benefit is people not buying and daily-driving $85,000 F-350s so they can tow a camper 4 weekends a year.
Rent
My suggestion would actually be "hotel" for most people.
But if you own a camper, you should probably have the means to move it on short-notice. If the waters are rising from a storm near my parent's house at 4am they can move the RV. Theirs is a Class-C motor home, so it can drive itself, but if they'd gone with a towable model they'd need the ability to move it.
There's also a class of people who basically live full-time in campers. Some are retirees. Some are people who work jobs that require them to bounce from place to place for a few months of work at a time. These are people who could, in principle, benefit from something like this.
There's also a safety factor for the drivers, depending on the reliability of the system. Having a massive trailer attached to your much-smaller vehicle can be disastrous in a wreck. Allowing the trailer or main vehicle to crash separately from the other is a good thing.
It requires two engines, a huge boon for car companies, and any companies that are in the supply or service chains for engines. As such I expect to see it on all model year 2028s. In 2036, they'll decide they "made a mistake" and some companies will stop doing it. They'll be hailed as revolutionaries for listening to customer demand.
It would alleviate the need to precisely back your hitch under the trailer's tongue. And it will kill 900 people in its first year on sale when driven through places of high 2.4GHz congestion. Like school zones and neighborhoods.
Cathode Ray Dude goes on this rant about PCs and to an extent all technology. He says that tech as a phenomenon is largely a 20th century phenomenon and is generally over now, that the things that can be invented have been invented, that we'll never see another Walkman, a device that changes what is possible so radically that stores can't keep them on the shelves.
We perfected the form factor of the automobile in the 1950's, and since then everything has been updates to styling, infotainment, powerplant efficiency and reliability, performance and safety. A 1950 Chevy Impala did everything anyone needed a car to do, we've since added seat belts, CD players and antilock brakes.
There's nothing for Toyota to do. They make legendarily reliable cars; the reason you buy a new Toyota is because a drunk driver totaled your old one. Basically every luxury feature comes as standard on all models now. What's the point of a Mercedes S class when you could have a Toyota Camry for a third the price that will ever work again if you miss an oil change by 3,000 miles or so?
There is no point to executives. Executives serve no function now that every product decision has been made. For the last 15 years, the only decisions executives have been making is how to make the product more profitable for the shareholders. The customer does not matter at all, because the customer can be forced to buy the product no matter what. All car manufacturers are making headlights a subscription service, the only cars that don't have that are used, they're aging and depleting. So we have arrived into a future where we don't say "I wish my car had this futuristic feature" or "I wish my car had the feature that's on this luxury model" or "check out the new feature on my car," we're now saying "I wish my new car had the features my old one had."
But executives need their bonuses. They need to go to trade shows with features they oversaw the development of, so that they can impress older executives into giving them louder titles and bigger offices. So we get shit like this. Towing a trailer is a completely solved problem, we have robust industries dedicated to hitches, brake controllers, lights, security etc. Masterlock even makes lock-shaped objects specifically for looking like you've secured the tongue to the ball. But for reasons that are beyond my understanding we haven't beaten the entire executive class to death with hammers yet, so these problems continue to be re-invented to be partially solved anew, hence: the wireless trailer hitch.
He says that tech as a phenomenon is largely a 20th century phenomenon and is generally over now, that the things that can be invented have been invented, that we'll never see another Walkman, a device that changes what is possible so radically that stores can't keep them on the shelves.
I bet there were people saying the same sort of thing a week before the walkman was invented
The week before the walkman was invented, someone was looking at the portable cassette player that was the size of a Chemistry textbook sold by Sony and saying "maybe we could take out the VU meters and the DSLR mic jacks and run it on AAs?"
The materials science and engineering principles we have now are so well understood that, without discovering a fifth phase of matter or a cheap way to make graphene or something like that, I don't see a revolution coming from STEM. If something sucks today, it's because of political or economic reasons, not engineering ones. We lower nuclear powered robots onto the surface of Mars using autonomous rocket cranes. We can engineer whatever the fuck we want. You look at Star Trek, and we don't have holography, matter replicators, matter teleportation or faster than light travel and that's basically it. Which one of those are you working on?
We're not going to get a phone that does something they don't already do, because the manufacturers would rather remove than add features. You might get one whose battery holds marginally more power per gram or charges marginally faster because they found a way to make a slightly different Lithium compound economically at scale.
This description of modern technology and innovation perfectly aligns with Karl Marx's theories on the stages of capitalism too. Hopefully we can see a full collapse before
before
A 1950 Chevy Impala did everything anyone needed a car to do, we've since added seat belts, CD players and antilock brakes.
Fire up any decent racing simulator that has 50s cars and try driving them, to disabuse yourself of the ridiculous notion that they were anything like modern cars. And then try proper track cars to see if your plebmobile can remotely compare in handling.
He says that tech as a phenomenon is largely a 20th century phenomenon and is generally over now, that the things that can be invented have been invented, that we’ll never see another Walkman, a device that changes what is possible so radically that stores can’t keep them on the shelves.
That's difficult to square with diffusion and transformers. There's no gizmo for video generation, but we nonetheless went from "ha ha avocado chair thumbnail" to real-time high-def photo-real CGI-for-dummies in five years. And dumb as LLMs are, they demonstrably perform some worthwhile labor. These are just two uses of backpropagation becoming practical thanks to one expert testing an alternative function on a whim, and raytracing dorks making video cards run serious programs.
Any problem with examples can now be trained on a supercomputer and run on a potato. Human comprehension is not a necessary component. This is a whole new kind of software, currently caught between blatant grifters and identarian haters. Shit's gonna get weird.
Actually it might entirely explain the AI bubble. Putting AI into things is the only move executives can do.
Shoving AI into everything is proving the uselessness of executives nicely.
You could tow anything with an economy car instead of a large truck.
Not unless the towamajigger weighs as much as a large truck! It's an intensely stupid idea for a bunch of reasons not interesting enough to break down here
A camper or boat trailer large enough to need a big truck to pull it will already have is own brakes.
The biggest reason for a heavy vehicle aside from the pulling ability is that the trailer can overpower the main vehicle when quickly changing lanes due to the whiplash caused by the sometimes 20+ ft distance between the front (steering) wheels of the truck and the hitch. It's actually why there have been a few experiments with 4-wheel steering for trucks over the years.
A remote towing vehicle would be able to significantly reduce the distance between the steering and the hitch.
Nope! How would it know if it has to turn on its brakes/turn signal (required by law)? This will either be put into specific models for more than a tow hitch costs, or presumably an adapter can be made that goes into an existing tow hitch but then the fuck is the point?
Tow lights connectors aren't magic. Any car can be outfitted for electronic braking and turn signals super, super cheaply. You literally splice into the wires going to the tail-lights. Then you have signals for the turn indicators, brakes, and hazard lights.
I rigged my vehicle for lights and brakes on a trailer for like 12 bucks.
I never said it was a good idea and you can ask the designers how it works if you want to know (btw it's probably the same way other automated braking systems work that many modern cars already have).
But not needing a big truck to tow would be a benefit whether you like it or not.
Didn't you read? You can do wifi towing.
I think this was only created because someone wanted to use this dumb phrase for some reason
You could probably hack it to tow your yacht with your bicycle
Damn it.
One wifi connection drop away from being rear ended by your own trailer.
This is absolutely horrifying. Have you seen how people drive?
Which is why I would rather have a machine-learning computer that is capable of measurements that a typical morbidly obese American is incapable of doing while they all simultaneously drive and use their phones.
If you've never towed a trailer, which sounds like you are ignorant and actually havent left your desk in your entire life, it's more than just connecting two fucking things and simply driving straight: the weight of your entire payload must sit at the pintle/mount otherwise you will get death wobble, the speed of your vehicle must not overcome the drag of your trailer or you'll fuck up the mounts, etc etc.
You want Bubba controlling several tons of shit traveling at 70 miles per hour, or a computer?
Listen, I'm all for a little trolling once in a while, but telling these nerds all the weight goes on the hitch is a bit too plausible and could really get someone hurt. I'd rather have an appliance towing than your strawman ass, but that isn't saying much
My strawman-ass needs to squat/deadlift at the gym more then!
NFT pfp, opinion discarded
I am simple, i like rainbows and believe i am as dumb as a chimp: found a rainbow chimp image on reddit and downloaded it. If you think I paid for it, i can assure you im constantly too broke to barely afford rent.
Sounds like you judge books by their covers like every dimwit bully I've had to deal with, so go fuck yourself.
I'm going to assume you're a parody account. Excellent joke post.
No. Occam's Razor: I'm just really really stupid.
Excluded middle
Please tell me Toyota isn't really working on this?
Originally published September 14, 2022
I could see a fleet of semis using this. Instead of one driver per truck, you’d have a couple drivers taking shifts. Plus the trucks could save fuel by drafting off each other. Good luck passing the highway train!! 😂
Australians kinda did that already with road trains
I was so confused why that toyota was so Durango shaped until I remembered americans got Sequoias
bitchless towyoto
Lol Brilliant