Ignore its warnings and the green light across the steering wheel turns red, the beeping gets more insistent, and eventually the car announces that assisted driving is being shut down until I stop and start over.
My wife has never gone quite that far.
My car is a harsh mistress.
But here’s what surprised me: I like it. Long highway drives are less tedious. I arrive less tired. The car doesn’t wander around the lane, creep from 68 to 82 because I stopped watching the speedometer, or get annoyed at the guy doing 64 in the passing lane. And because it keeps demanding that I watch the road, I may actually stay more alert.
That isn’t what I thought self-driving would be. I imagined a chauffeur. I’d tell the car where I wanted to go, read something and wake up in Montreal.
What I have instead is a very competent co-driver who never gets tired, never gets distracted and has absolutely no sense of humor.
Which got me wondering how far away the chauffeur really is.
My GMC uses what engineers call Level 2 automation. The car can steer, accelerate, brake and change lanes, but I am still the driver. It does the work; I accept the blame. That is why it spends so much time staring at my eyeballs.
Level 3 changes that relationship. Under certain conditions, the car takes over and I’m allowed to stop watching the road continuously. GM says it plans to begin offering that kind of eyes-off highway driving in 2028, starting with Cadillac. If the technology follows GM’s usual pattern, it will likely spread to other high-end models after that.
Beyond that is the car that no longer expects a human to rescue it at all. That sounds futuristic until you realize Waymo is already doing it. In several American cities, you can get into a car with nobody in the driver’s seat and it simply takes you where you are going.
So self-driving cars have already arrived. They just haven’t arrived everywhere.
That distinction matters. A Waymo can drive itself around parts of Phoenix or San Francisco. That does not mean I can put one outside my house during a February snowstorm and say, “Take me to Montreal. Wake me when we get there.”
Highway driving is relatively civilized. The lanes are marked, everybody is moving in roughly the same direction, and pedestrians generally have enough sense not to wander across I-95.
Then you get off the highway.
Now there is a UPS truck stopped in half the lane, a bicyclist beside you, somebody backing out of a driveway, a police officer waving you through a red light and a construction crew that has decided the double yellow line is merely a suggestion. Add snow and half the visual clues disappear. Add New England and a deer runs across the road. Add Boston and the painted lanes are often more of a historical record than an operating instruction.
Teaching a computer to handle predictable driving turned out to be the easier part. Teaching it what to do when something completely screwy happens is the hard part.
Still, we have crossed an important line. Self-driving is no longer a technology waiting to be invented. It is a technology waiting to become general.
And that raises a more interesting question: what happens when the computer becomes a demonstrably better driver than I am? No comments about that, please, especially from family members.
I can imagine the first step being special autonomous highway lanes. Enter the lane and the computer takes over. If computerized cars can coordinate speeds, merging and braking better than humans, they could reduce both accidents and those mysterious traffic jams where everyone stops for ten minutes and nobody ever discovers why.