Write Your Congressman: The Driver Is Standard Equipment
Ram made Hands-Free Active Drive Assist standard on a 777-horsepower truck built to be driven. Ask that the person at the wheel be the factory default, and the machine that steers for him the extra a buyer goes out of his way to want.
To the Honorable Member of Congress:
We write on behalf of the plainest thing a driver is owed and is quietly losing: that the person holding the wheel be standard equipment, and the machine that would take it from him be the option.
Read what Ram did and made ordinary. By the maker's own account, the 2027 Ram 1500 TRX SRT arrives with Hands-Free Active Drive Assist, Level 2+, as standard. Standard, on a 777-horsepower truck. Not a box a buyer checks. The factory setting. Ram built a machine this alive and then, in the same breath, volunteered to do the driving for the man who paid for the engine.
Here is the plain trouble. Hands-off arrives as the default now, the thing you get whether you asked to stop steering or not, and the person who wanted to drive is quietly recast as the upgrade. We charge no rival by name and we point at no one system beyond the one Ram itself calls standard. We say only that the drift runs one way, and that it runs against the driver.
We propose no statute, and we will not pretend a bill could keep a hand on a wheel. No law drives the car. We ask only for the plain order a driver's machine deserves: that the human at the wheel be the standard, and the self-steering the extra a buyer must go out of his way to want. The person is not the option. The robot is not the upgrade.
Let the driver be standard equipment. Write back to us when you have.
Respectfully, The Editors