Ask someone about their travels, and one of the first topics they’ll remark on is how the people, wherever they were visiting, drove their cars. There are New York drivers, aggressive, impatient, and honky. There are California drivers, well adapted to freeway-coasting bumper-to-bumper congestion. In Florida they drive fast; in Maine they drive slow. This is by no means limited to the United States. In Cairo, a city whose streets operate almost entirely without signals, drivers have learned to operate in a collaborative, if grating, cacophony—there, beeping is just another way of talking. In Jakarta, Indonesia, part of the morning road commute involves decelerating, in the middle of traffic circles, to hand tips to traffic conductors who keep everything moving.
What, then, will come of these tics in the age of the autonomous vehicle? If we’re to take self-driving car companies seriously, the human driver, and the way humans drive, stands to be automated away. Indeed, for our car culture, the end of the road is one where software rules it.
Waymo, arguably the leading AV company, has become famous for its robotaxis, primarily the white electric Jaguars with spinning Lidar sensors. For now, the company has pursued the ride-share model, competing with Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxis. But it’s hard to imagine the company will limit its scope to high-tech cabs. Waymo says it wants to build the world’s safest driver. If it succeeds, Waymo’s future is software. Waymo won’t correspond to a particular car, a typical type of ride, or even a particular business, but to the system that operates them.
We’re certainly in the nascent stage of the self-driving era, and companies must be highly attuned to the small number of vehicle models equipped to truly drive autonomously; most vehicles aren’t designed for this. But if these companies succeed, a car’s make won’t indicate whether it’s autonomous. They’ll all be autonomous.
Dmitri Dolgov, a co-CEO at Waymo, has expressed the hope that, eventually, the Waymo Driver will be installed in people’s personal cars. (Consider that the company has a partnership with Toyota and is rolling out the driver in its new Zoox cars.) Other AV leaders have shared similar goals. As TechCrunch reported, Laura Major, president and CEO of the Hyundai-backed AV company Motional, has also suggested that, eventually, full autonomy would come to private vehicles. (The company recently launched its first robotaxi fleet in Las Vegas.) Tesla, of course, has promised for years that eventually, its popular electric vehicles will become capable of full self-driving.
This world dominated by self-driving cars is perhaps many years, even decades, away. But if and when it does arrive, it stands to monotonize much of the aforementioned driving cultures. Building self-driving car software is expensive and involves significant hardware investment and, often, the arduous work of mapping out new geographies and training navigation software to handle all sorts of knotty edge cases. Only a handful of companies are likely to pursue, and succeed, leaving the world with only a handful of, well, “drivers,” in the same way there are just a few dominant operating systems.
Sure, people might observe small differences. It might be that Waymo software will come to be known as a little more defensive, while Tesla code is perceived as a little more daring. As with phones, it might be that a company—à la Apple—dominates self-driving software among wealthier nations, while others, perhaps a Chinese company like Baidu, might dominate the technology’s sales in the Global South, similar to BYD and Huawei today.
It’s not new that technology monotonizes. Phones, the movie industry, television, and then social media have visibly eviscerated much of the friction that allowed cultures to develop on their own. It’s less apparent to us, but the development of autopilot technology has increasingly done so for commercial airplanes. Take a flight, and your travel experience is surely influenced by pilots, but the experience is also largely shaped by the algorithms developed by the globe’s aerospace duopoly: Airbus and Boeing.
There are plenty of reasons to think applying this streamlining to cars would do humanity well. Human drivers are, by any reasonable public health standard, a disaster. Car crashes kill about as many people as firearms, at least in the U.S., more than 100 a day. Driving is also a massive time suck. In cities like Los Angeles, daily car commutes, per the Federal Reserve, can last 30 minutes on average, accounting for hundreds of hours behind the wheel annually. Even learning to drive is a major chore, and many teens are already opting out, in favor of Uber or Lyft. We don’t know which company, if any, will win the difficult and expensive race to build software that can accomplish this goal. But we may all “win” in a world where we save time, and—through safer software—save lives.
But we will lose something, too. Driving is a cornerstone of contemporary life, an axis of culture. In a future dominated by AI navigation, we won’t become acculturated to the left- and right-handed wheels, or maintain pride in learning how to operate a stick shift. There won’t be road rage, only screaming at a robotaxi customer service line. We will all be the passenger princess, and riding shotgun will mean less than ever. This culture isn’t worth saving, but it’s worth memorializing, at least while we still have it.