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.
No, not only no, but HELL NO!!
Someone invents a new toy, and there are always those that just have to have one.
The mindset of many Americans is “New is better, bigger is better and high tech is better”. Not always, especially when it comes to digital devices.
Besides the obvious safety hazards and limitations driverless cars have, they also have potential risks the much loved cell phone has. Which means it can be hacked, it will have a perfect record of everyplace you’ve been, control can be hacked into and drive you where you don’t want to be, like off a cliff. Anything said can be overheard and recorded. It’s another way to take away freedom and control the public.
It can be said many new vehicles already have these drawbacks, but they can be defeated. I’ve defeated them on our vehicles.
One of my most memorable drives was from Mackinac City to Detroit. It’s about 250 miles.
We got in a pack of 5-6 other cars all bound for a similar destination. We hung together almost the whole way, switching out positions and making holes for each other. We ran about 90-100 mph. It was fun and safe. We made it home in an amazingly fast time. Obviously that was rural roads not in the city. But hey, I’m from Detroit where you’re not tailgating unless your bumpers are touching and turn signals are a sign of weakness.
I have no interest in a driverless cab. I don’t do Uber much but I actually enjoy meeting and conversing with drivers ad learning their stories.
Since I get carsick if I try to read in the car, I’d rather be an active participant
My son did pick up those traits. He’s a professional trucker. One day a couple years ago he was driving a dump truck (Normally runs semi’s) when a school bus full of kids pulled out of a side street right in front of him. A witness said it was kind of cool seeing a dump truck balanced on two wheels for 100 feet. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to save it and rolled the truck. God had his hand in it. He was basically uninjured.
The school bus driver actually fled the scene. She was later found and fired.
Defensive driving started for me with my early experiences on a motorcycle. That is a situation where defensive driving is a MUST if you wish to stay alive. I think it paid off, although I am constantly hearing from non-motorcyclists about how dangerous they are. I am a senior citizen with no chargeable accidents I am aware of.
I run studded snow tires.
That reminds me of the 4 rules of defensive driving I learned in driver’s ed around 50 years ago: 1) keep your eyes moving; 2) leave yourself an out; 3) get the big picture; 4) make sure the other guy sees you.
The only accident I’ve had was from a guy who t-boned the car blasting through a stop sign.
I was riding on a large motorcycle and just passed through a town square when I approached an intersection. I had the through-way and the opposing traffic had a stop sign. I had an odd feeling so I slowed down. Just as I began to enter the intersection, a Red Bronco blasted through the stop sign right in front of me.
I pulled into a feed store parking lot to get blood pressure down when the Bronco pulled up near me. I parked my bike and approached. It was an old woman with a child in the vehicle. She asked me if she had almost hit me. I calmly told her she ran the stop sign and if I hadn’t slowed before entering the intersection she would have gone right over me.
She apologized and I told the kid that my sisters and I counted Volkswagens during long car trips and now I can always pick them out. I asked her to count motorcycles so she will always see them when she’s driving.
Later, I told a coworker about it. She later approached me and asked if it was a WHITE Bronco. I said it was red. She asked if it was a little boy in the vehicle and I told her it was a girl.
I asked her why she had these odd questions and she said she just wanted to confirm who it was. It turned out the lady worked with her mother. Right after the incident, she called her daughter and told her she had ran a red light and a stop sign and almost hit a motorcycle. The daughter took her in for a medical check up. She had survived breast cancer but at the appointment they found the cancer came back and was in her brain.
I thank God that I kept my cool. I would have been justified to get ugly but it would not have helped anything.
My car is apparently a nightmare for repairs. To replace the air conditioner fan, for example, I would have to remove the accelerator pedal and a couple other things. I have replaced the cabin filter myself, but it required a screw driver to undo the glove compartment first (in a Honda Civic, you can just pop it out). I also replaced the air filter, but the stupid replacement wouldn’t fit inside the compartment at first, so a guy at O’Reilly Auto Parts helped me to get it in.
One repairman I know believes that if somebody wants to design automobiles, he should first be required to work in auto repair for a few years. That way, he would be less likely to design it in a way that complicates the h*ll out of things for repairmen.
How did I miss this? Thanks for sharing.
And don’t forget about changing a tire. I know how to do that, but the lug wrenches included with automobiles nowadays are these teeny-tiny, torqueless things that would require somebody with the strength of the Incredible Hulk to loosen machine-tightened lug nuts.
I’m almost 74. I tapped another car when I was 20. No damage. A couple years ago, I bumped a car in a parking lot. The guy had pulled up behind me when I was backing up in a snow blizzard. No damage. That’s it.
We have moved closer. The other son is about 12 miles away.
Well, good.
You are covered.
I should be so well situated.
The author is projecting this stupidity on everyone else.🤔
What a testimony! I’m glad you obeyed the inward witness. Nice tip on how to train yourself to notice things.
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