Gadgetory

hi everyone and welcome to the inside scoop I'm cnet's Cara tsuboi joined by senior editor Wayne Cunningham who covers car technology for the site thanks for joining us Wayne welcome today we're talking about a really sweet wonderful little video at a New Zealand that has started to go viral and it depicts a dog driving a car give us the background of the backstory of this video well this this was done as kind of a publicity stunt just a way to get people to recognize that there are dogs and shelters out there that can be adopted and so this actually came out of the Wellington New Zealand SPCA a worldwide organization taking in dogs strays and things like that or dogs that are just given up to them and what they've done is they've taken three dogs and actually trained them to drive a car that's amazing and it's basically to prove that these dogs are smart just because they're mud yeah they're stupid exactly they're worthwhile they have value and it's a way to show that you know they can also eat rain later in later years to yeah these are older dogs sitting less PCA but you know there's still smart perfectly trainable and happy to work with these trainers of the SPCA provided to train them to grab the car they've actually got a mini countryman and they show a number of videos of them picking the dogs fixing up the car so the dogs can drive it and then of course the the big one is one of the dogs same quarter actually driving the car around a little bit of this crack so when I first watched that video I thought wow the dog really is you know accelerating steering braking but as a car expert you're saying that it might not be that complicated no well really what they're doing is they have a trainer walking alongside the car as they go and the trainer is kind of yelling out commands to the dog so the dog doesn't necessarily know what he's came to breaks or no he's printing the string wheel he's following commands as he goes along and the car is you know it's an automatic so it creeps along i think what they've done is they have an accelerator pedal for the dog in the carpet the dogs not really using it so the car just sort of creeps along and you know it's two miles an hour or something so the trainer can walk alongside and a yellow can answer the window and then the dog is very eager to perform these commands and dog actually turns the wheel to go around a bend in the track and hits the brakes actually at the end to stop the color which is really delightful to see you cover cars you rethink breathe cars have you ever seen a dog driving a car before no no actually that's one of the great things i saw a photo that they posted to one of the dog sitting in the driver's seat ready to go and you know you see photos like this all the time somebody posted joke photo like oh my dogs driving a car but this daughter she driving the car she really doing yeah so it's very unique in that sense I think what's also unique is how fast this video has spread I mean it came out of New Zealand but it hit America pretty quickly and it's all over social media that's how you found out about right oh yeah it's on facebook and i think it's taken off right there and it's breeding a lot of attention to the whole plight of dogs you don't get by the SPCA and apparently these dogs the three that they trained for this this for driving two of them have been adopted already and the second one's still waiting adoption but you know I suppose that's going to happen pretty soon oh that's a nice happy ending to this story already thank you so much Wayne Cunningham senior editor I'm Kara Tsuboi thanks for watching the inside scoop