Years ago, in Amsterdam, I met a brilliant Dutch physicist who told me—over beer and a plate of ribs, I think—that self-driving cars weren’t so far away.
“The thing is,” Desmond continued, topping off my glass as he spoke, “they’ll be more like public transportation or taxis, something we don’t own, something one summons with the push of a button. And eventually, they won’t even need to be shaped like cars as we know them at all. They may be cubes or rectangular prisms—interlocking shapes that function as movable daytime space, for instance. Little offices, perhaps, or anything else people need.”
“No way, Des! You sure?!”
He was.
I didn’t tell him, but back in my teens and 20s, I totaled two Ford Tauruses, a Mercury Grand Marquis and a Toyota Camry. It was bad, y’all, and that’s to say nothing of all the cars I hit, too, including a whole stoner pileup outside of a reggae festival (none of us were capable of anger right then, thankfully), or the day I ran the wrong yellow light in my mother’s Crown Victoria, with my learner’s permit in place and mom in the passenger seat.
Technically, that one wasn’t my fault, but by the time she limped away, my mother had a broken foot, a ruined land yacht and a heart full of lasting and understandable rage about my driving skills, if not my whole way of life.
“I looked for my daughter after the wreck,” she still tells people, seething decades later, like a dormant volcano ever-liable to wake up and turn your ass into a fine mist, “and finally realized she’d crawled onto the fucking trunk and was reclining up there—lying down, almost, giggling and squealing—because firefighters were giving her attention.”
I mean, true. The other truth is that far more people could’ve been hurt (somehow, only my poor mother was) or even died while my friends and I were laughing and smoking and racing each other at stoplights. No joke, a Texas driver’s ed teacher passed a whole cohort of us, despite having just one working eyeball to her name. Uno, guys. You can’t make that up.
Human error isn’t the only thing that maims and kills and drivers and passengers, of course, but government agencies cite it as a contributing factor in the majority of cases, and car wrecks are the top cause of death for anyone age 5 to 29, per the World Health Organization. That’s infuriating.
Companies such as Waymo and Tesla still need major scrutiny, of course, especially given Tesla’s self-reported safety data. Personally, I wouldn’t give anything but the finger to Elon Musk anyway. Waymo looks promising, however, and claims a more than 90 percent reduction in pedestrian injuries and a far safer ride for passengers.
For what it’s worth, I’m a safe driver now, too. Parenthood does this, as do adult prefrontal cortexes and waking nightmares about what could have been. Hell, I rarely even play music in the car, let alone use a phone, but am still nothing like the colleague of my husband’s who wears a helmet behind the wheel. He’s got to be the most embarrassing relative in someone’s entire life, yes, but he’s also a trauma surgeon who sees constant death and head injuries. They all do.
Think of it this way: One day, we may all look aghast at the century when just about everyone hurtled around freely in 4,000-pound machines. After all, we no longer have to climb to the top of rickety coal trains like Victorian commuters once did, or teach skittish animals to pull us around in buggies, either.
Maybe we love driving because cars are so customizable, just like carriages once were: big floaty ones with deep leather seats, solid little scrappy ones for off-roading and camping, camo-wrapped ones with lift kits and gun racks and copyright-infringing bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on things. Whatever makes you proud.
Just know that road-ready, safe and eco-friendly autonomous vehicles are coming soon, too—hopefully so soon that my kids never learn to drive at all.
And really, would you want them to?
Georgia Fisher is a writer and journalist from Austin, Texas, and Reno. She was the Reno News & Review’s special projects editor in 2014-’15.