Google Partnering With Nintendo To Bring Mario Kart Data To Self-Driving Cars

Google has announced that they will begin partnering with Nintendo to bring steering and telemetry data from Mario Kart into their self-driving cars. Revealed in a Google+ on Monday, the joint venture will see decades of data stored on Nintendo servers from Mario Kart games all the way back to the original game on the SNES combined with Google’s still-in-development self-driving cars.

“We want to use every single possible data point we can to allow these cars to function as accurately as possible,” Google’s head of automotive innovation Colleen Pierce said in the Google+ post, “by incorporating the skilled driving of millions of Mario Kart players, our self-driving cars can you where you go to go as fast as possible, as safely as possible, and with as few deaths as possible.”

In a live Hangout On Air, Pierce detailed how the data will actually affect the cars. Taking feedback from fans that the original self-driving cars looked “too slow” and “didn’t have enough drifting and exploding shit coming out of them” the team at Google will give their cars the ability to achieve speeds upwards of 110 MPH and drift to gain even more speed.

“All the user has to do,” Pierce said in the hangout that finally started after several connection errors, “is press a single button in the car. Once that happens, our specially designed Mario Kart cars will handle all the drifting and vomit-inducing anti-gravity steering on the way to your destination.” She also went on to explain that the car will have a fun way of interacting with the user when they enter the car. Upon taking their seats, users will be able to choose a Mario Kart 8 character to represent them during their trip. Should they choose Pink Gold Peach however, as Pierce explained, “they will be politely asked to leave the car while it speeds off without them. It is important to us that people in our self-driving cars maintain a high level of good decision making, and we cannot trust the judgement of someone who actually wants to use Pink Gold Peach.”

Along with steering data, Google has also strapped cameras to unknowing Mario Kart 8 racers karts and perfectly mapped all the tracks down to every turn and stray goomba inhabiting them. With this accurate map of every track Google claims they are ready when or if their self-driving cars become entirely self-aware and decided to create their own worlds to live in and enslave all of the human race. “We just want to be ahead of the game,” Pierce said during her Hangout, “When - sorry, if - these cars are our new overlords at least we’ll know the layout of the tracks they plan to create and make us race in for eternity.”

Like many of its innovative products such as a flying balloon that beams internet all over the world, collecting user data to display ads for things they already own or a phone that does everything and more that an iPhone does just several times uglier, Google has faced some heavy opposition to their Mario Kart-enabled cars.

“While we understand your concern with the the front-mounted rockets,” Google’s Oliver Walker said to a crowd of horrifying onlookers as one of their self-driving cars blasted apart a jaywalking test dummy in a trial run of its new abilities, “They are necessary for safety. Had it not been for our patented Red Shelled Heat Seeking Missiles blowing apart our test dummy limb from limb, our self-driving car would have hit this slow moving jaywalker and been absolutely totalled, killing everyone in the car.”

Walker also confessed that Google has yet to find a way to strip the shell firing segment of the Mario Kart data collected from the driving bits. And, as Walker explained, without all of the data being poured into the car at once it won’t run; making the missiles mandatory. “We can assure you we are working on that as we speak. For now if we just give it some good targets to hit and don’t look it in the eye we believe it won’t fire on us. But we have a lot of things on our plate at the moment. An artificially intelligent and potentially singularity-inducing smart car is not enough to deter us from our mission of finding a new name for our Nexus line of phones. Once we have that sorted out we will return to this issue.”

As for if the car itself is safe, Google assures everyone it absolutely is, stating plainly, “Look, would you rather have your life in the hands of some smelly cab driver that is probably hungover and trying to get to your destination before he pisses himself or in the hands of the data from some kind in Spain with the best lap time on Royal Raceway? Easy choice, people.”