Jordan McGillis recently wrote a piece for NRO about the advantages of self-driving cars. While I share some of his views about the likely improvements in traffic safety, the idea of fundamentally altering our relationship with cars is one that I find repulsive.
McGillis writes:
As happens around 100 times each day in America, a car’s human driver had caused a fatal collision. Due to distraction, inebriation, incapacitation, malice, or just plain incompetence, human drivers caused collisions resulting in the deaths of more than 40,000 people in the United States last year, the highest number of roadway fatalities recorded in more than a decade according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) statistics. With 2021’s troubling uptick, the cumulative number of Americans killed by motor vehicles has climbed to well over 4 million since we first put cars on our roads over a century ago. In 94 percent of roadway collisions, the NHTSA says, drivers are to blame.
Self-driving cars offer hope that this seemingly endless series of tragedies might come to an end (or something close to it). Where human drivers succumb to physical and psychological weakness by nature, self-driving cars are immune.
These numbers are tragic. However, figuratively removing humans from the driver’s seat cannot be the solution.
Giant metal contraptions zooming around at 70 miles per hour are inherently dangerous, some would say gloriously so. But the driver should always be the primary controller of the vehicle’s progress. She decides when to turn, how fast to go, and the route to take. Safety technology such as lane-keep assistance, emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control are estimable, all the more so because they vastly curtail the driver’s flaws to which Jordan points.
My car can mitigate a crash’s damage to me through crumple zones and braking. Adaptive cruise and lane-keep ensure that a commute through Iowa is less draining. Blind-spot monitoring and backup alerts keep us from harming others behind or beside us. And each of these technologies revolves around the driver, not vice versa.
Driving is independence, and the idea of mandated deference to a machine mind is repugnant. I’ll decide how I wish to take a corner, how quickly to accelerate, and my route to the cottage up north — slowing down to take in the creeks and sights at leisure. If I wanted to travel passively, I’d take a bus or a train. Imagine having mandatory self-driving on a Hellcat . . . egad!
To wrest from the driver the act of piloting is to pass liability on to another entity. If a crash occurs, I’d like the person responsible to be present, rather than my having to call some Palo Alto toll-free number to complain that I had a fender bender with someone who was sitting in one of the company’s self-driving cars. Ambiguity in liability is an avenue best detoured.
But I’m not a Luddite. Self-driving would be an attractive option for a long trip out West, and it would afford people with disabilities a previously unknown freedom of movement.
Being the driver in New Mexico was a bummer because one’s eyes shouldn’t stray from the road to take in the stark wonder. Turning on autopilot to snap a photo would have been brilliant — but only ever as an option, not a paternalistic requirement.
Driving is dangerous, yes. Not to be trite, but living is dangerous. We have plenty of technologies that improve traffic safety without involving a replacement for the human driver. So I’ll pass on the safety-ism and mandatory proliferation of self-driving cars.