Eventually there could be roads where the sign effectively says:
FROM HERE TO BOSTON, YOU’RE NOT DRIVING.
That sounds ominous until autonomous cars start having far fewer serious accidents than we do. At some point, the human driver may become the dangerous part of the system.
And once the car no longer needs us, another familiar part of life starts looking peculiar: the garage.
Why does my car have to sleep with me?
We have built enormous rooms onto our houses so machines that spend perhaps 23 hours a day doing nothing can sit ten feet from the kitchen. That makes sense when the car cannot move without us. It makes less sense when it can.
I can imagine getting out at my front door and having the car drive itself to a neighborhood storage building, where it gets parked and charged. The next morning I tell it I need it at 8:15, and at 8:14 it pulls up outside.
The building itself wouldn’t need wide ramps, pedestrian aisles or enough space between cars to open the doors. Vehicles could be packed together like merchandise in an automated warehouse.
A car barn.
That could eventually change cities as well. Vast amounts of valuable urban land are now devoted to storing automobiles. If cars can drop us off and then store themselves somewhere cheaper and denser, much of that land could be used for something else.
Of course, we will find a way to screw this up.
If downtown parking costs forty dollars and electricity for two hours of aimless driving costs two bucks, why park? We could finally invent a car intelligent enough to drive itself and immediately tell it to circle the block because we’re too cheap to pay for parking.
The more I look at this, the more I think we have been thinking too narrowly about autonomous cars. If they really work, they don’t just change the automobile. They change highways, parking, houses and perhaps cities themselves.
For the moment, mine still won’t take the exit without me. It still watches my eyeballs. And if I misbehave, it flashes lights, makes increasingly irritated noises and vibrates my ass until I behave myself.
My wife, meanwhile, continues to operate her own -assistance system from the passenger seat, using verbal route corrections and occasional dashboard grabbing.
Between the two of them, I may be the most heavily supervised driver in New England.
But I’m beginning to think we spent twenty years waiting for the wrong thing. We were waiting for a chauffeur.
It turns out that a really good co-driver is already pretty useful.