could be “automatic”? It was like the difference between scrubbing dishes by hand and sticking them in a dishwasher. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long for my wish to be granted. Two years after I got my license, I managed to total the Subaru during a late-night misadventure, and not long afterward I took stewardship of a used, cream-colored, two-door Ford Pinto. The car was a piece of crap—some now see the Pinto as marking the nadir of American manufacturing in the twentieth century—but to me it was redeemed by its automatic transmission.
I was a new man. My left foot, freed from the demands of the clutch, became an appendage of leisure. As I tooled around town, it would sometimes tap along jauntily to the thwacks of Charlie Watts or the thuds of John Bonham—the Pinto also had a built-in eight-track deck, another touch of modernity—but more often than not it just stretched out in its little nook under the left side of the dash and napped. My right hand became a beverage holder. I not only felt renewed and up-to-date. I felt liberated.
It didn’t last. The pleasures of having less to do were real, but they faded. A new emotion set in: boredom. I didn’t admit it to anyone, hardly to myself even, but I began to miss the gear stick and the clutch pedal. I missed the sense of control and involvement they had given me—the ability to rev the engine as high as I wanted, the feel of the clutch releasing and the gears grabbing, the tiny thrill that came with a downshift at speed. The automatic made me feel a little less like a driver and a little more like a passenger. I came to resent it.
M OTOR AHEAD thirty-five years, to the morning of October 9, 2010. One of Google’s in-house inventors, the German-born roboticist Sebastian Thrun, makes an extraordinary announcement in a blog post. The company has developed “cars that can drive themselves.” These aren’t some gawky, gearhead prototypes puttering around the Googleplex’s parking lot. These are honest-to-goodness street-legal vehicles—Priuses, to be precise—and, Thrun reveals, they’ve already logged more than a hundred thousand miles on roads and highways in California and Nevada. They’ve cruised down Hollywood Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway, gone back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge, circled Lake Tahoe. They’ve merged into freeway traffic, crossed busy intersections, and inched through rush-hour gridlock. They’ve swerved to avoid collisions. They’ve done all this by themselves. Without human help. “We think this is a first in robotics research,” Thrun writes, with sly humility. 1
Building a car that can drive itself is no big deal. Engineers and tinkerers have been constructing robotic and remote-controlled automobiles since at least the 1980s. But most of them were crude jalopies. Their use was restricted to test-drives on closed tracks or to races and rallies in deserts and other remote areas, far away from pedestrians and police. The Googlemobile, Thrun’s announcement made clear, is different. What makes it such a breakthrough, in the history of both transport and automation, is its ability to navigate the real world in all its chaotic, turbulent complexity. Outfitted with laser range-finders, radar and sonar transmitters, motion detectors, video cameras, and GPS receivers, the car can sense its surroundings in minute detail. It can see where it’s going. And by processing all the streams of incoming information instantaneously—in “real time”—its onboard computers are able to work the accelerator, the steering wheel, and the brakes with the speed and sensitivity required to drive on actual roads and respond fluidly to the unexpected events that drivers always encounter. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has now racked up close to a million miles, and the vehicles have caused just one serious accident. That was a five-car pileup near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in 2011, and it
I was a new man. My left foot, freed from the demands of the clutch, became an appendage of leisure. As I tooled around town, it would sometimes tap along jauntily to the thwacks of Charlie Watts or the thuds of John Bonham—the Pinto also had a built-in eight-track deck, another touch of modernity—but more often than not it just stretched out in its little nook under the left side of the dash and napped. My right hand became a beverage holder. I not only felt renewed and up-to-date. I felt liberated.
It didn’t last. The pleasures of having less to do were real, but they faded. A new emotion set in: boredom. I didn’t admit it to anyone, hardly to myself even, but I began to miss the gear stick and the clutch pedal. I missed the sense of control and involvement they had given me—the ability to rev the engine as high as I wanted, the feel of the clutch releasing and the gears grabbing, the tiny thrill that came with a downshift at speed. The automatic made me feel a little less like a driver and a little more like a passenger. I came to resent it.
M OTOR AHEAD thirty-five years, to the morning of October 9, 2010. One of Google’s in-house inventors, the German-born roboticist Sebastian Thrun, makes an extraordinary announcement in a blog post. The company has developed “cars that can drive themselves.” These aren’t some gawky, gearhead prototypes puttering around the Googleplex’s parking lot. These are honest-to-goodness street-legal vehicles—Priuses, to be precise—and, Thrun reveals, they’ve already logged more than a hundred thousand miles on roads and highways in California and Nevada. They’ve cruised down Hollywood Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway, gone back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge, circled Lake Tahoe. They’ve merged into freeway traffic, crossed busy intersections, and inched through rush-hour gridlock. They’ve swerved to avoid collisions. They’ve done all this by themselves. Without human help. “We think this is a first in robotics research,” Thrun writes, with sly humility. 1
Building a car that can drive itself is no big deal. Engineers and tinkerers have been constructing robotic and remote-controlled automobiles since at least the 1980s. But most of them were crude jalopies. Their use was restricted to test-drives on closed tracks or to races and rallies in deserts and other remote areas, far away from pedestrians and police. The Googlemobile, Thrun’s announcement made clear, is different. What makes it such a breakthrough, in the history of both transport and automation, is its ability to navigate the real world in all its chaotic, turbulent complexity. Outfitted with laser range-finders, radar and sonar transmitters, motion detectors, video cameras, and GPS receivers, the car can sense its surroundings in minute detail. It can see where it’s going. And by processing all the streams of incoming information instantaneously—in “real time”—its onboard computers are able to work the accelerator, the steering wheel, and the brakes with the speed and sensitivity required to drive on actual roads and respond fluidly to the unexpected events that drivers always encounter. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has now racked up close to a million miles, and the vehicles have caused just one serious accident. That was a five-car pileup near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in 2011, and it
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