The Self-Driving Car is Finally Here

It’s 2023 and I still don’t feel like I’m living in the future” There has definitely been advances in technology throughout my life but for the most part I haven’t felt a FUTURE SHOCK moment where I’m startled. Have you?

I’m referring to the future of sci-fi books or movies that I read when I was younger that I associated with living in the future. The internet is massively influential, but it still feels like it’s part of another world, a parallel dimension. An extension of Television almost.

This week, GM’s autonomous vehicle division, Cruise, is set to deploy a small fleet of vehicles on the streets of Seattle, Washington. This is happening because last week, Waymo and Cruise vehicles began functioning in San Francisco just like paid taxis, minus the driver. They are available 24/7 on the road. For the first time, some people could book rides and pay fares for trips a driverless car. At the moment, Waymo is operating 200 cars in San Francisco, while Cruise has 300 vehicles in its autonomous fleet.

Seeing a car without a driver at the wheel weaving around pedestrians and changing lanes is gives me a future shock reaction. Self-driving cars have always been a necessary part of any sci-fi future I watched growing up.

Now, they are starting to become a reality on the road.

For several years, San Francisco’s hilly and congested streets have doubled as a test track for hundreds of driverless cars operated by Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company owned by the Google parent company Alphabet, and General Motors-owned Cruise.

It’s not completely perfect yet as you can see from this video. There is a human available remotely who can help the vehicle out when issues arises. But sometimes they have trouble connecting.

The Next Phase?

Are we at the next stage of transportation? Will we look at the manual car as we know it today as a temporary 20th century phenomenon that got replaced by the self-driving car like how the car replaced the horse a century ago?

Elon Musk certainly thinks so. But he’s in the business of selling you self-driving cars.

Shifting to a society full of self-driving cars brings up a lot of interesting issues. Some of them very positive:

• Potentially lower accident fatalities

• Potentially smoother rides and less traffic jams

• Potentially reduced need for parking because the self-driving car will drive itself back home

Some negative:

• The car locks the doors and drives you to the police station if there is a warrant out for your arrest or if you had one beer

• Running over pedestrians and causing you to be charged with manslaughter

• It drives off a cliff killing you

Also philosophical:

I would be fine getting inside a self-driving taxi but I would not absolutely buy a seat on a self-flying plane. I know that the risk of dying is higher in a self-driving car. Maybe it’s the abject horror of an airplane crash or it calms me knowing the pilot goes down with the plane. Perhaps you feel the same way.

In This Newsletter

1) What Happened to the Modern Car? The last 20 years have caused an evolution in car design that has been slowly preparing us for a self-driving car future.

2) Will the Self-Driving car become triumphant because of Safety-ism?

3) Opponents of the Self-Driving Car. There’s going to be an interesting anti-Self Driving Cars coalition of tech-skeptical liberals + conservatives who don’t want to feel captive inside a computer not fully under their control versus the mass public who want to lower fatality rates on the road.

What Happened to the Modern Car?

Cars have changed. A lot. It may not seem like it because the changes have been gradual, but we’re mostly driving around in big smart phones at this point. It’s not a big leap to switch to electric or to self-driving. We’re almost there at this point. In contrast, it would be real weird to jump into self-driving cars if we were all still driving cars that looked and drove like 1977 Pontiacs.

The good news is new cars are all good now, no matter the price point. Lemons don’t exist anymore. For most of the 20th century, there was a risk that you would buy a new car and it would just break down one day and you couldn’t fix it. It got so bad that in 1991 Congress passed a "Lemon Law”. This was a normal car buying experience:

But there have been other changes. The next time you go out driving, take a look at the cars around you. You’ll notice a few things. The first is that color is

The car company Fiat even shot a fun commercial announcing they will stop making grey cars because there are already too many.

Or take a look at the actual shape of the cars. They all seem to look the same.

But perhaps the worst feature in modern cars is that the headlights. They are very bright now and blind everyone on the road.

The Car Interior

If you drive a new car you may notice that you don’t hang your arm out the window anymore. It’s uncomfortable. The windows are smaller on new cars and don’t reach below the shoulder so it’s hard to hang your arm out the window. The smaller and higher windows also mean that when you do roll them down it creates a lot of draft and noise, including uncomfortable pressure flucations. That’s a safety thing. Big doors protect you in collision. New car design is based on safety.

But that also means you’re not rolling down the windows. You’re just cruising along in perfect climate control.

Years ago Elon Musk had an idea. What if, instead of paying money to install buttons and knobs in the console of the car, he could slap a tablet on there and just sell it to people.

Soon enough, every new car decided to do the same thing. There’s even a growing backlash against all these screens in the car.

Driving itself is different now. Take the advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) which is found in most cars now. It assists the driver with the safe operation of a vehicle. ADAS uses automated technology, such as sensors and cameras, to detect nearby obstacles or driver errors, and respond accordingly. ADAS can enable various levels of autonomous driving. If you swerve onto the shoulder it will nudge you back onto the lane. We’ve already gotten used to having a little bit of automation

Automation has a kind of totalizing logic to it as Matthew Crawford explains: “At each stage, remaining pockets of human judgment and discretion appear as bugs that need to be solved. Put more neutrally, human intelligence and machine intelligence have a hard time sharing control. The ability to exercise skill and judgment, to balance prudence and risk and, more broadly, to negotiate one’s individual freedom within the collaborative give-and-take of the road.”

Safetyism vs Freedom

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