Write Your Congressman: Give a Driver a Switch That Turns the Listening Off
A cabin assistant is rolling out into Volvos back to 2020, listening for its name and, on the maker's schedule, learning to read a driver's messages aloud. Every car that can listen should ship with one honest switch that makes it stop.
To the Honorable Member of Congress:
We write on behalf of the driver's right to sit in his own car and be heard by no one.
Read this week's lead. Volvo and Google have begun rolling Gemini into Volvo cabins, a first wave of customers in the United States, scaling in the weeks ahead to anyone with an active connection in the car and a U.S. English Google Account. By Volvo's own account it reaches models back to 2020, it moves beyond fixed voice commands into natural conversation, and it listens for its name. On the maker's schedule it learns to summarize the texts that arrive and to speak for the driver, sending the message in his stead. We do not charge that every eligible owner is being listened to today, and we do not begrudge the man who wants the thing switched on. We ask what happens to the man who wants it switched off.
Here is the plain trouble. The listening lives on a menu, six taps deep, and a menu resets. The next update restores what the last one turned off, and the setting a driver chose on Monday is quietly rechosen for him by Thursday.
We propose no statute, and we will not pretend a bill could hold this. No law drafts a good dashboard. We ask only for a switch: a real one, on the dash, wired to the microphone, that a driver can reach with his own hand and that stays where he left it. One control that does one thing and stays done.
Give a driver a switch that turns the listening off. Write back to us when you have.
Respectfully, The Editors