It’s splashed across every news outlet, fueled by the world’s most respected and innovative companies. The concept floats through us, almost unnoticed. Not many society-altering ideas that can be summed up in two words. So maybe the simplicity of the expression is causing it. Or, are we just too jaded to give the idea a second thought?
Regardless, these two words, “driverless car” deserve more than our cursory attention. So let’s lean back to envision a world of the driverless car.
As a kid, I always imagined them as these cool little pods that took me from my parent’s basement to anywhere I wanted. And inside my head, they did. The candy store. Disneyland. The skating rink. I just needed the darn things to be invented.
Then I turned 16. And it all changed. The driverless car was dead to me.
Because in 1984, I could experience that all on my own. I didn’t need a pod or my imagination to take me places. I had me. My nervous, feather-haired, Izod-shirt-wearing self. And the keys to a hand-me-down Plymouth Horizon.
34 years later, the driverless car is here. But it’s missing one important thing. The driver.
Working in advertising for a major auto brand for 21 years, I realize the importance of the driver. They are central to the vehicle. People don’t buy cars because it will get them places. It’s how it makes them feel, it’s what that vehicle represents, it’s the goodies inside while you are driving.
Driving is not to be commoditized. It’s not a bus, or a train. Driving is identity, especially in Southern California. Here, for better or worse, driving is life.
What vehicles do represent is freedom. Control. Responsibility. But only when you are in the driver’s seat. Can an algorithm stir your emotions? Probably not. Can the computer drive the car a little faster than it should, to give you that adrenaline rush you crave? Doubt it. Can a driverless car help you escape a break up? Or wash away a bad day with a perfect road and lost miles? Can a driverless car fly off the side of a road while you are distracted by Christie Brinkley in a Ferrari? Can a driverless car jump a bridge with a Smokey in pursuit? You see where this is going, right?
But you know who can do all that awesome stuff. A driver. You can make white-knuckle turns on lonely highways. Miss an exit and discover something new. Whisk away from a traffic light, just because.
The point is, when we lose the driver, we lose everything that makes driving part of our culture. We lose us.
Get ready, it’s coming.
I think about my three kids, especially my son, a newly licensed driver. It makes me proud and terrifies me. He’s changed, both in how he acts and how I see him. He is now in charge of something profoundly life-changing that lives on a broad spectrum between pure joy and pure disaster. Where else do we find that feeling? Where else can we feel so human? So invincible and yet so vulnerable.
But if kids are raised in the world of driverless cars, they will never have that control or responsibility. They will never scrape a bumper, get a speeding ticket or stay out past curfew. They will never hide away in the backseat with a date counting bases. They will never grow up because they will never be in control in a stage where they need to be.
What about the rest of us? Everything is so automated these days, or figured out by a decision engine. We have lost what makes us, us. We are outsourcing every thought, decision and desire to machine learning.
Do we really want driving to be next?
Driving is so ingrained in our society, we sometimes forget just how important the human element is to it. What will a movie chase scene look like 25 years from now? In 100 years will the excitement of this generation turning 16 be a lost relic, something that is only experienced in history books, or the next century’s Throwback Thursday?
In a country built on automotive culture, where does that leave future generations? These days we have more than enough tools to track each other on our phones, but what happens when our kids are no longer in control, and the car is? When kids cannot experience that same imperfect way of growing up with cars that we did. Sneaking out with a girlfriend, pretending to be somewhere they’re not. That will be but a memory too.
When every car drives the same, speeds up the same, maintains the same safe and functional characteristics, how will they be marketed? Or will we completely lose the passion for what driving represents in a strange, cultural evolution? Perhaps, vehicles will simply be like fleets, different shades of vanilla with no real brand or identity. Or are marketed like cell phones in the latest extension of format wars.
Yes, driverless cars will be safer, more efficient and make our lives easier. But isn’t imperfection what makes life so grand? Are we all willing to make the tradeoff, rather than just driving safer and more efficient ourselves?
This may seem like purely nostalgic musings, so let’s think about the new generation of drivers. Perhaps one day it will all come full circle. Where kids dream of driving a real car.
But that possibility may be as unlikely as my dream of a driverless car in the 80's.
