The car of the future and our future in cars

Google glasses may have flopped but the self-driving Google car has arrived to claim the future like the first desktop computer did in 1977. Nevada began crafting rules for driverless vehicles in 2011. Volvo and other automakers are developing their own autonomous cars. We already have cars that sense the traffic around them and park themselves. But this extension of those technologies will change everything.

Despite our love for the wheel, we may be drawn inexorably into going driverless. Insurance may be the cause. Carriers will charge a high premium to people who want to steer their vehicles compared to nominal fees to those who choose the driverless models. Self-steering will become a fringe taste—like baking from scratch and riding horses—but regarded as dangerous and socially irresponsible. It will be left to young men who are prone to high-risk behavior, a few type-A personalities with control issues, and some old people who just don’t like change.

This is a very different machine that will have a very different effect on how we think and behave. The terms “driverless car” or “autonomous car” will quickly sound like “horseless carriage,” what we used to call the automobile. These will likely take the name autos, and we’ll distinguish them from cars the way we separate smartphones from telephones.

Life will change. Will Zipcars become as common, even on suburban streets, as mailboxes and phone booths used to be? One reason people prefer cars over buses is that rubbing shoulders with the unpredictable public can be off-putting. A system of publicly or corporately owned cars (think CitiBike, but with cars) might catch on, making actual car ownership as uncommon in the suburbs as it is in the city. You will no longer park where you work. Your car will just show up on command like Bruce Wayne’s Batmobile.

Once we reach a critical mass of these cars, they can be smaller, more fuel-efficient, travel faster, and internally resemble a business car on a commuter train. This will make longer commutes possible. That’s bad news for the Hamptons and Vermont.

The upside to this prospect is that many fewer people will die each year. Almost 33,000 people died in car crashes on American roads in 2013, 14 percent of which were pedestrians. To that add serious injuries, grieving loved ones, and lost productivity. Much of the stress of driving and its consequences would disappear, including road rage. Driverless trucks would be a huge gain, except of course for truckers. Self-driving rigs neither stop to sleep nor fall asleep on the road. They would be safer for everyone and more cost effective for trucking companies.

But technologies are not just tools to be used as we please. They shape or misshape us. The printing press. The car. The internet. Will this latest innovation make us more passive? Will we live shorter lives because we are less involved in the challenge of decision-making? Challenge keeps us sharp and slows aging. Will we be a little closer to the pampered, purposeless roly-poly people in WALL•E? But then there are those 33,000 dead. It’s hard to argue against that.