A Florida state senate candidate gets attacked over his support for driverless cars.

Forget gators, zombies, and escaped pet pythons. The new menace in Florida, if this ad is to be believed, is the driverless cars that terrorize the streets, mowing down slow-moving pedestrians and smashing into things.

The spot is a last-minute attack on Jeff Brandes, a state representative from St. Petersburg running for an open state senate seat in today's Republican primary. Brandes sponsored Google-backed legislation this year that made Florida the second state in the country to allow driverless cars on its roads. He never imagined it would become a political issue.

"The bill passed unanimously through the House and Senate," Brandes told me. "I thought [the ad] was a little bit bizarre. It's clearly trying to scare seniors, even though seniors might benefit the most from this technology." He expects to win today's primary, despite what he sees as a desperate ploy by backers of his opponent, fellow Republican Rep. Jim Frishe -- who, he notes, also voted in favor of his driverless car bill.

Brandes is a true believer in the driverless car concept -- the politically correct term is "autonomous vehicles" -- which he first learned about from a TED video last year. The cars have logged 300,000 miles without an accident, he says, though they are still in testing and not yet commercially available. Once they're widely implemented in the coming decades, Brandes believes, they could halve the amount of traffic accidents, reduce congestion and stress on infrastructure, restore the mobility of those too old to drive and give back all the lost hours of productivity currently spent sitting in traffic -- by, for example, state legislators who have to commute 4.5 hours each way to Tallahassee. (These benefits, however, must be weighed against the terrible blow to the comic output of Dave Barry, who once wrote, "We have so many motorists driving into buildings down here that in some areas you're safer standing in the middle of the street, where they're less likely to hit you.")