Taking Your Hands off the Wheel: America’s Self-Driving Future
The Last Driving Generation
You climb into your car at 6am, tap ‘office’ on the screen, lean the seat back, and fall asleep. Two hours later, a gentle alarm wakes you as the car pulls into what used to be a 200-space parking lot but is now a tree-lined plaza.
At 4pm, you head home. Instead of fighting traffic, you’re answering emails while your car seat gives you a massage. That evening, you relax in your new sunroom, a space that used to be a two-car garage. When your son texts from practice that he forgot his running shoes, you send the car to drop them off.
This may sound like a scene from the Jetsons, but parts of it are already here.
Last week, Waymo announced plans to start driving on freeways in the San Francisco area, a sign of the rapid progress in self-driving technology. Waymo has logged more than 100 million miles in full driverless mode, while Tesla has accumulated 3.6 billion miles in supervised mode.
So how do these vehicles actually…drive?
Behind the Wheel
Driving is messy. Road conditions change, drivers behave unpredictably, and unexpected situations demand constant attention. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) handle this complexity using cameras, laser scanners, and radar to build real-time maps of their surroundings regardless of weather conditions. On-board AI models trained on billions of driving scenarios process this stream of data to make decisions.
Here are the top companies racing to perfect this technology:
Who’s Leading the Race
Waymo was founded in 2009 by Google and has pioneered industry-standard technologies including rooftop laser scanning and mass-scale driving simulation. It launched the first commercial driverless robotaxi service in Phoenix in 2018. Waymo takes a safety-first approach and has a serious-injury accident rate 91% lower than human drivers.
Tesla has pursued AVs since 2016 and has accumulated over 6 billion miles in supervised mode, which requires a human driver ready to take control. Tesla is betting on a vision-only approach skipping expensive lidar sensors in favor of cameras alone. If this works, Tesla will gain a huge cost advantage, but critics argue it compromises safety.
Chinese companies like Baidu are fierce competitors, operating robotaxis at $0.35 per mile versus $2.00 in the U.S. thanks to government support and subsidies. Government-backed rivals with 83% lower costs create an extra challenge for companies wrestling with profitability.
Fear Factor
Perhaps the biggest challenge AVs face is consumer confidence. Despite their safety record, 61% of U.S. drivers say they are afraid of AVs and only 13% would ride in one.
Why the fear? First-time AV riders often feel panic when taking their hands off the wheel. There’s something deeply vulnerable about watching a car steer itself when your life depends on it. Media coverage amplifies these fears. When an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in 2018, it became a national story. The 40,000+ deaths caused by human drivers the same year barely made local news.
The irony is that AVs are incredibly safe: widespread adoption would save 25,000 lives per year in the U.S. and 1 million globally.
The best way to build trust in AVs is first-hand experience. Researchers found that people who had ridden in an AV were 3.8 times as confident in the technology than the general population. Simply living in a city with robotaxis improved confidence by 34%.
The AV Dividend
Full AV adoption would fundamentally change daily life.
Cities would be reborn as millions of parking spaces convert to housing and public parks, and municipal budgets shrink as the need for traffic police, DUI enforcement, and parking enforcement drops. But there’s a trade-off: increased suburban sprawl as cheap robotaxis make longer commutes tolerable, and more traffic as people abandon mass transit.
We get a time dividend: Americans spend 95 billion hours per year driving, which is more than we spend socializing. Self-driving cars would unlock this time for work, entertainment, or learning, making our daily commute productive instead of dead time.
When Driving Isn’t a Job
While this dividend is substantial, it comes at a cost. Full-scale AV adoption threatens millions of people’s livelihoods.
Many of the 3.5 million American truck, delivery, and taxi drivers would lose their jobs, especially those with little human interaction like long-haul truckers. New jobs in fleet maintenance, remote vehicle operation, and AV support would offset these losses, but the transition wouldn’t be simple or painless.
Impacts would extend beyond drivers. If individuals stopped owning cars, the infrastructure built around personal vehicle ownership would contract. Dealerships, insurance agencies, repair shops, and gas stations would either consolidate to serve robotaxi fleets or disappear entirely.
Roadblocks Ahead
Beyond the employment trade-offs, massive obstacles remain before AVs replace personal cars.
Profitability: GM shuttered Cruise after $10 billion in investment because it couldn’t find a path to profitability. Unit economics are challenging. Analysts estimate Waymo’s vehicles cost $150,000 each, and the company won’t be profitable until costs drop below $100,000. Increased production will help, but $50K is a big gap to close.
Legal Issues: Laws are nonexistent or confusing. When an AV crashes, is the automaker, software provider, or the fleet operator liable? Operators also face a patchwork of regulations: federal approval to sell, state approval to operate, and local support to execute.
Weather: Most AV miles have been logged in mild-weather cities like Phoenix and San Francisco. To truly replace human drivers nationwide, AVs need to navigate a Fargo blizzard as well as a California highway.
Given these challenges, most experts don’t expect personal car replacement en masse until 2035 at the earliest.
The Last Driving Generation
My first car was a 1978 silver Cadillac DeVille with leather seats. It was an old, boat-sized gas guzzler, but man I loved that car!
Today I own a Tesla that does 98% of the driving for me.
My youngest son is about to get his driver’s license, a rite of passage that signals adulthood and independence for most Americans. Will his kids need one?
There’s a good chance they won’t. Just as Gen X saw a world before and after the internet, Gen Alpha will remember when humans still drove cars.
I’ll never forget that first Cadillac. But I won’t miss spending two hours driving to work every day.
Dad Joke: Why did Google deploy a fleet of Way-mo cars? Because one wasn’t enough! 🤣
Thanks for reading!
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