I May Not Know Much About Horses But By God I’ll Learn

Autonomous driving is very expensive and not very effective, but it’s a fancy tech problem and we love to throw money at those. Would that money be better used somewhere else, like existing technology that performs the same task more efficiently with lower costs? Details! We don’t need to think about that, it’s about solving things.

Plenty of responses to my breakdown of AV investment relative to transit spending yesterday took this approach, insisting that AVs were progress and therefore inherently better than other forms of transportation. Only one of those, though, teed up an absolute perfect joke from Lil Xanos.

As a child of suburbia, rather than wide open rural country, I know absolutely nothing about horses. I know they bite, the anatomy of their legs is a genuine horror show, and each and every one stares with the soul of a Victorian child who died in a coal mine and now seeks revenge on the world of the living without much discrimination as to who or what bears the brunt of the pain. Those are pretty much the three horse facts I know.

Still, I’d learn, in order to help run a site with such a perfect pun name. I’m a sucker for the highest form of humor, and will carry on a bit much too far if given the opportunity. Though I’m now glad I never got a Jalopnik tattoo or legally changed my middle name to Jalopnik — both things I have genuinely considered in my time at the site — because the horse rebrand is inevitable.

Congratulations, Lil Xanos, on your Comment Of The Day win. I’m not sure if Gallopnik could really pull off a Traffic Jams series, given that I’ve never seen a horse traffic jam, but I can pretend. In that world of imagination, the site’s first Traffic Jam goes a little something like this.