I’m one that loves to drive, but I see a world where people will be happy to be done with it. I moved from Seattle (where I commuted for 41 years) to rural KY, where I drive 160 miles round trip on my commute, half of it on beautiful two lane twisties. I drive a 2013 FR-S with Michelin PSS’s. I’ve been through seven sets of tires and have a blast every single day. I don’t even think about cops, but do have to watch for deer. I’ve done this for 143,000 miles.
But a funny thing happened. I’m finding I’m getting bored with driving, even drifting. If I could sit back on my 90 minute commute (each way) and read, or surf the internet, or a myriad of other things, I could really learn to love it.
And as I used to say to my friends back in 1970 in high school, when they hated a political change and they would say, “People will never accept that” - my response is the same as it was back then: “I think what you mean to say is that THIS GENERATION will never accept that.”
A very good point. My son is in the M generation and he uses Uber to get home from the bar if he is not the dedicated driver. He loves the Tesla model and would like to turn driving over to his car from instead of securing a ride with Uber. But he does understand that driving is something he would not want to give up. He does believe in the future where everyone has an automatic mode in their car and on commutes the cars will take over and manage to get us where we are going faster than in today’s gridlock situation. (And I understand that some jerks mess the roads up for the rest of us. Autopilots will probably still be plagued by this same mindset.)
So I am agreeing with you, I am 72 and still like driving but when I was commuting, for the last 5 years of my work career (at a place that was served well by light rail) I used the public system. It was to avoid traffic and also I was starting to fall asleep on the drive home.
However, I think back to when they wanted us all to car pool to reduce traffic, one engineer I worked with said he would never give up the privacy and freedom that he had in his own car. I think what I am arguing about is that aspect of Freedom. Even when commuting, you are free to leave the congested highway and get where you are going on a back road. I believe that some people in our race (I do not know the percent, probably less than 30%) will opt out of the let-machines-take-over-for-us. Sure, they can do more of the boring and important production jobs, and I am not saying that everyone will be gainfully employed, some of us may just get a check from the production system. But I am still thinking like members of my generation in the expectation that every generation will have those independent minded people who will not buy a car that cannot be operated in manual mode (even if it does have an autopilot too.