Posted on 06/11/2025 7:14:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you live in Northern California, you know this already. In a few years, driverless cars will be everywhere. You will likely use them if you travel to the city. If you live in a town of any substantial size, you or someone you know will likely use them.
The numbers on the increase where they are currently permitted are simply amazing. In less than a year, the Google company called Waymo has increased its weekly ride volume from 10,000 in August 2023 to more than 250,000 today. It has passed 10 million successful trips. These cars are everywhere on the streets of San Francisco. They are coming to many other cities including Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C..
There is competition with Uber and Tesla for the same.
Those who have taken them report relief from painful conversations with drivers and safety concerns that come with eccentrics behind the wheel. You can get work done and have conversations without distraction with a super-safe AI driver that gets you where you need to be without tailgating, risk-taking, or missed turns.
That this is our future seems absolutely certain to me. And the core reason is precisely the one that has long vexed this technology: safety.
As a young driver, I had the mentality of every boy that age. The road is mine. I will master this machine and drive as fast and far as I am able. I will never get into a crash. Those are for other people. I will weave in and out of traffic with my experience and destination as my only concern.
There was some point in my adulthood when I was on an interstate highway where the traffic speed was pushing 85 miles per hour. The cars were close to others’ bumpers. People were moving in and out of lanes quickly, accelerating and decelerating. Off-ramps and on-ramps were feeding cars into this frenzy every few miles.
At some point, I conceptualized the whole of it. And then I realized. This is utter madness. In a culture in which everyone obsesses over safety—terrified of playgrounds and disease and strangers—we are all happily engaged in the craziest imaginable experiment.
We were handed the keys to two-ton piles of steel on wheels to every comer after a short test, taken one time in a lifetime. We invite anyone to enter onto giant slabs of hardened tar and do whatever they want with only painted lines as guides. And these people accelerate as fast as they can get away with, and otherwise follow whatever rules they want, with the only enforcement mechanism being a police car that randomly appears to check on things.
The mystery is not that there are 6.1 million automobile crashes in the United States every year. The mystery is why there are not 61 million or more! That the roads are as safe as they are is a tribute to self-interest and the magic of self-organizing systems. Somehow people have managed to work it out and not be in a constant state of panic!
After realizing this, I could never go back. I became a super-safe driver, avoiding all packs of cars and staying in the least-used lanes, backing quickly away from any car that was moving erratically or otherwise in some kind of hurry. I never, ever, pick fights with drivers and never get angry no matter what happens. My one and only concern is to get home safely.
This experience has caused me to look more carefully into the history of the Interstate Highway System. It was conceived in the years immediately following the Second World War, when elites became suddenly and wildly over-impressed by American achievements in the realm of the automobile. It was said to embody the ideals of freedom and individualism.
President Eisenhower embarked on the world’s largest infrastructure program that fundamentally changed life in America. It was radical and sweeping and took fully 40 years to complete. The federal government confiscated enough land to cover the whole state of Delaware and moved enough dirt to be knee deep in the whole state of Connecticut.
All of this happened without much political objection or controversy, which seems utterly amazing in retrospect. Not even the partisans of free enterprise or libertarianism blinked an eye about a central plan that would have made Mussolini blush.
The United States had led the world in passenger trains for a century. Suddenly no one even cared about those old things. Countless thousands of small towns with beautiful train stations—now turned into breweries or antique shops or left to decay—were completely wrecked. The suburb was born along with the franchise businesses that serve them.
The whole system was pitched as a way to make our lives more convenient but the opposite happened. We moved further away from work and cities, and our commutes got ever longer. The family homestead was no more. Vast swaths of our lives became consumed by auto debt, repairs, vast stretches of tar and concrete that could stretch to the moon and back 10 times, and popup communities with cookie-cutter houses and brand-name businesses.
The project utterly changed the country. Many communities never recovered. It seems remarkable that the entire project unfolded without much thought. A deeper reason, of course, concerned national security during the Cold War. Our leaders wanted roads for easy evacuations and for moving military equipment but it wasn’t sold that way. It was sold as the key to a better life.
The entire experience, part genius and part boondoggle, is not without benefits. But it is not without costs, including 42,000 traffic fatalities every year. Given that, and given the horror of the scene that unfolds before our eyes daily coast to coast, I’m amazed that there is not more concern and opposition than there is.
In any case, you are likely as worried about the safety side of this as I am. Remarkably, this is how autonomous driving figures into the mix. There have long been safety concerns. Those have been solved so much that it is indisputably true that they are vastly safer than cars operated by humans.
If you think about it, the driverless car is nothing but a little train made just for us. It is going forward but it is also going back, away from the randomness of human volition and toward a machine that is on an established path that thus removes the exigencies of human misjudgment.
Hardly anyone considers a deeper truth. Maybe we made a mistake in 1957. Maybe we should never have abandoned the passenger train system that we already had in place. Maybe all those highway deaths were unnecessary and maybe the creation of the suburbs as well was too much.
Americans instead have done what we always do. Rather than reversing errors, we have innovated around them, creating new technologies and plans to fix the problems created by the old technologies and plans.
Sure, I’ll hail a robotaxi. But I would much rather have a passenger train system that is humane, efficient, functional, and safe. Once at the train stations, cars get us the rest of the way, just as they did in the 1930s.
Yes, I am aware that there is no going back. And maybe these new driving robots will help repair some damage.
Here’s an interesting little factoid that is true for now and only adds a point of irony. These driverless cars are not yet allowed on highways. The reason is local regulations that survive.
Authorities are still committed to the idea that daily you must risk your life on these monstrosities they created long ago and service constantly with your tax dollars. It’s error upon error.
Probably there are going to be terrible downsides to robotaxies that we cannot yet foresee. On the other hand, maybe they will peak for the urban tech set and go the way of many briefly fashionable experiments before.
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What about people in rural areas. We need self driving cars too
Boycott.
Otherwise, we'll be slaves.
It is a great way to, over time, make roads disappear because the cars will not know the roads are there. That would allow the elites to hide in plain sight and industrial complexes to similarly disappear.
And when the time comes, AI will have them drive you to the gulag.
Doubtful where I live
Yeah, cause we really need LESS upper body exercise. I just hate this crap. Just WHY. Leave me alone let me drive my GD car. Why do so many morons cheer this crap on.
“Vast swaths of our lives became consumed by auto debt, repairs...and years spent behind the wheel.”
We recognized that problem early on. I always insisted we live less than 10 miles from work and I was able to hit 4 miles for me, 10 miles for my wife. We always bought used cars with 20k to 30k on them and saved a bundle on first year depreciation. We always had four year loans and kept the cars 10-12 years, so we had many years without automobile debt payments.
With those few simple decisions, we were never slaves to the automobile.
What I want is a THIRD PARTY involved if some stranger is driving me as I don’t like being a HOSTAGE to some Pakistani who might be behind the wheel, particularly if he has control of my luggage. If that means Uber, fine, if it means a taxi service that is based on paying the THIRD PARTY, not the Pakistani, fine. If it means a driverless car, where I don’t pay the (non-existent Pakistani) driver fine. In all these other cases, it’s no longer me being a hostage.
I like to do my own driving.
Who pays when an accident occurs has been the biggest impediment to driverless vehicles. It is a legal spaghetti nobody has figured out.
Safety? Like when the driverless car parked over top of a woman in the street? Took awhile for her to be noticed (i think it was overnight or early morning) and then the company had to be contacted to get it off her. Thankfully she wasnt dead or badly injured in body but i would think that could mess with your mind to be pinned under a vehicle thats doing what it chooses to do.
MULTIPLE WAYMOS WERE TORCHED IN THE LA RIOTS.
Will they get me to my destination quicker?
I know it won’t be as fun, but it also won’t be as aggravating. Both are characteristics of driving.
Not in what’s left of my lifetime,
“With those few simple decisions, we were never slaves to the automobile.”
Agree, in my case, it’s about once a DECADE where I will pay someone for a non-covered repair. The rest of the time, I fix the cars myself and I don’t buy into the crap that cars are “too complicated” to fix - 20 years ago we didn’t have YouTube, now we have resources that we only DREAMED OF then - plus, if you buy a Japanese car, most of the dreaded repairs never happen. The people making the “too complicated” claims are simply making excuses for their laziness.
Unfortunately, the expletives still fly.
I LIVE RURAL.
HAVE FOR OVER 32 years. WAS RAISED RURAL.
HAVE been driving since age 16. Now 85.
HAVE driven over a MILLION MILES===NO ACCIDENTS.
HAD ONLY ONE NEW CAR IN ENTIRE LIFE & PUT OVER 444,000 miles on it in about 22 years.
DRIVING 1976 1 ton STEEL 4 speed dually 454 Chevy truck that has over 348,000 on the chassis. I PERSONALLY PUT ON OVER 250,000 miles TOWING 2 horse & 4 horse trailers-—bought it used in 1986.
DRIVE 1979 STEEL BUICK WAGON with over 224,000 miles...bought it used in 1981. Also towed 2 horse trailer with it.
EASY to maintain. PARTS still available.
SUMMIT RACING PARTS HAVE NEVER LET ME DOWN.
DO NOT HAVE ANY INTEREST IN ANYTHING SELF DRIVING.
HAVE been places with truck that are rather off the beaten track.
Telecom changed massively in the 1990s with packet-switched networks (AKA the Internet) replacing circuit switched networks. Packet switched networks were much more flexible and thus useful, not to mention cheaper overall.
There are lots of parallels with the transition from trains to cars, with trains being like the older less flexible circuit switched networks and cars/trucks on roads analogous to packets on a packet switched network.
You can’t convince me roads and cars aren’t a better idea.
What could possibly go wrong?
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