Driverless Car Drives Off Cliff When Passenger Puts Barry Manilow On Repeat

“The passenger apparently subjected the vehicle to one or two more iterations of ‘Copacabana’ than any being can handle.”

Maale Adummim, March 21 – An automated vehicle destroyed itself and its human cargo this morning by careening through a roadside barrier and tumbling down a steep hillside because the person inside kept playing terrible music, police are reporting.

Department spokesman Abed Ladaat told reporters that preliminary evidence indicates that around nine o’clock Wednesday morning, an automated car traveling from Jerusalem to Bet Shean via Highway 90 crashed through a retaining rail at the side of the road and plummeted twenty meters, killing the passenger and totaling the vehicle. According to forensics, the car was prompted to deviate from its programmed course by the passenger, a male in his forties, playing the song Copacabana by Barry Manilow for the fourth time in a row. The man’s identity will be withheld pending notification of his family.

“We have here a tragic case of negligence,” stated Ladaat. “No intelligent entity can be expected to tolerate such abuse, and the passenger apparently subjected the vehicle to one or two more iterations of Copacabana than any being can handle.”

Road safety activists cautioned against drawing conclusions from the incident regarding the safety of automated vehicles. “This is undoubtedly a special case,” noted Tash Tiyot of the National Road Safety Authority. “There remain vanishingly few cases of driverless cars behaving more dangerously than human drivers, and in this case, it’s actually surprising that the car lasted as long as it did. In some tests, driverless cars didn’t even last through a single playthrough of ‘Weekend in New England’ before crashing at top speed into the nearest available barrier. So this tragic incident in fact might demonstrate the superiority of this automated system over others, and certainly over human drivers. I would have driven into a wall at the first realization what I was hearing.”

Driverless technology developers have struggled with similar issues in testing, but no previous music-related accidents have occurred on public roads. In 2015, a Google model caused itself to flip over and burst into flame after four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence on the part of the human inside the vehicle, which investigators determined was caused by the car thinking it was a recording of John Cage’s 1952 avant-garde piece consisting only of the musicians sitting with their instruments at the ready and not playing for exactly that duration. The passenger suffered only minor injuries, but the company instituted a testing protocol that required human indication that Cage was not being played or performed.

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