I just got access to Waymo One in LA. I took my first self-driving car ride a few weeks ago and it blew my mind.
It’s kind of a wild experience sitting in the back seat of a Jaguar SUV while no one sits in the front and the wheel turns itself. It navigated 4-lane roads with ease. It stopped on crowded side streets to let oncoming cars pass, then pulled out and continued on its way. It asserted itself when it needed to — not overly cautious, but not aggressive either. It drove confidently.
Which got me to thinking — when will self driving cars be so prevalent that the technology enables new car design? I’m not talking about just cars without a steering wheel or pedals — I’m talking about radically smaller cars.
50 years ago we had much smaller cars. They were also much less safe: they didn’t even have collapsible steering columns until the mid-1960s, so if you had a head-on collision they’d spear you in the chest (if you weren’t already grievously injured by the shards of glass or razor-sharp sheet metal). You were the crumple zone.
Car design has not just followed fashion to give us bigger cars, but rather safety and regulations. We run crash tests and demand safer and more efficient cars. It’s an evolutionary cycle: as the cars around you get larger and heavier, you need to be in a larger and heavier car to be safe. But when does that cycle start to reverse, as traffic accidents become more and more rare?
Beyond that, when will it be mandated that cars are sold with self driving features? There was a time when seat belts were optional or rarely equipped. Then in 1959, Volvo introduced 3-point belts as standard and made the IP behind them freely available in the name of saving lives. In 1968, the US DOT required that every car manufactured have seatbelts. Will there be a similar mandate for self driving features in the name of safety?
Will you be able to turn them off and, if so, under what circumstances? I race cars for fun and most racing series require drivers use no aids, including traction and stability control, but I absolutely never turn them off unless I’m on the track.
Will we have a “cash for clunkers” initiative to get human-driven cars off the road? Or will that become politically unpalatable as conspiracists latch on to the notion there’s a shadowy cabal controlling our cars.
But, returning to the car design point: at what stage are self-driven cars safe enough — even if there are still human-piloted cars on the road — that they can be designed to take up less space? At what percent of cars on the road does this start to happen? How and when does this affect the ease of transiting notoriously traffic-clogged city centers?
I don’t see it happening before 2040 — but if the technology continues progressing, I think all the above is a “when” and not an “if”. And eventually, humans driving cars will be like humans riding horses: rare, expensive, and mostly done for fun in dedicated spaces.