About Those Driverless Cars and the Political Power Play Behind Them
In any event, this is a good time to revisit the subject of driverless cars, aka autonomous vehicles. One of my current favorite YouTubers is a guy named Dan Toomey at Good Work, whose videos are almost always equal parts informative and hilarious. Last week, he posted "The fight over driverless cars is here," which offered an appropriately cynical update about the efforts by Waymo (Google/Alphabet's driverless car subsidiary) to shove a dangerous technology down the public's collective throat. The bottom line is that Waymo's financial muscle has led spineless local and state politicians to give the go-ahead to a public safety nightmare that is simply not ready for prime time (or even late-late night).
My previous columns discussing driverless cars include "A Mindless Attack on Driverless Cars" in 2016, and "Driverless Cars and Other Emotional Coping Diversions" in 2023. In the former, I was a bit of a naif who was touchingly optimistic about a new technology. In my defense, many people at the time were similarly googly-eyed (pun shamefully intended), for the simple reason that the hoped-for end game here is a world in which people do not have to deal with car ownership's many expenses. Oh, and also perhaps it could lead to a reduction in the 40,000-plus deaths by automobile per year in the United States alone. Again, that is per year.
This, moreover, did not appear to be a matter of hoping for some fantastical tech-Eden solution. There is a very straightforward story in which driverless cars become feasible -- under assumptions that certainly do assume technological advancements, but not of the sort that are imagined with "Terminator 2"-like melting and reshaping robots -- after which it could be a relatively straightforward matter of redeploying federal transportation funding to allow driverless cars to interact with street signs and tech embedded in roadways.
The utopian vision here -- and again, there is a huge difference between utopian and impossible -- is a world in which road rage, drunk driving, falling asleep at the wheel, texting while driving, and all the rest have given way to a level of safety similar to air travel. The numbers are stark: "The 2023 death rate for air passengers was 0.003 deaths per 100 million miles. The rate for car and truck passengers was 0.53." Moreover, the air travel deaths broke down in a way that makes the case for driverless cars even stronger, because about three-fourths of deaths during air travel "involved on-demand air taxis, which are small planes of 10 seats or fewer," while commercial air travel had only one fourth of those deaths. That means that there were five deaths -- 5!! -- in 2023 by air travel that did not involve people running small, dangerous flight operations, compared with over 40,000 deaths by car.
I suppose it is an entirely different matter to note that "[t]he highest rate of fatalities was via motorcycle, which had a rate of 30.6" -- almost 58 times higher than cars and trucks and 10,200 times higher than air travel. After all, the dudes who think that motorcycles are for Real Men are hardly going to go for driverless Harleys. But one thing at a time.
And speaking of 'Murica, I suppose it is also worth pointing out that the occupants of driverless cars will suddenly have their hands free to use their God-protected guns (with an ownership rate of more than one firearm per person in the US, by far the highest number in the world) as they please. I do not want to imagine the shooting galleries that Florida's highways will become. So perhaps that will offset some of the lives saved by technology, but again, one issue at a time.
It is, however, essential to point out that we might never in fact reach that tech-savior world. It is not only because the world's most reviled tech bro has continuously over-promised the arrival of fully autonomous cars but that there truly might be insuperable barriers that will make fully person-independent driving impossible. That is where Toomey's video ends as well: It would be great if it could happen, because it truly would be one of the most important public health breakthroughs in human history, but it is long past time to be skeptical about the notion of tech inevitability.
The central point that Toomey emphasizes in that video, however, is much more in the here and now. As I noted above, Waymo is being unleashed on Americans when the tech is clearly not ready. Why? Here is a line from my 2016 piece, which might count as my most innocently optimistic comment ever:
None of this is to say that politicians and regulators should simply let the companies write the rules. Of course the companies will "balk at regulation[."] There is always a need for public policy to constrain the excesses and arrogance of people (an especially plentiful breed in Silicon Valley) who view themselves as the geniuses who will save humanity. But again, vague assertions that politicians seem excited about driverless technology are hardly proof that they are going to roll over and allow Google to sell [unsafe driverless] cars.To be sure, I have already mocked myself for that statement, writing in my 2023 column that "Pollyanna had nothing on me!" But the point is worth emphasizing again and again, because we have in fact learned in the intervening ten years that politicians will in fact "roll over and allow Google to sell [unsafe driverless] cars."
In that 2023 piece, I also compared my relative optimism about driverless cars to my oft-repeated equanimity regarding corporate ownership of homes. That is, there is nothing inherently wrong about allowing corporations to own single-family homes and rent them to willing lessees, any more than there is a reason to think that apartment buildings should always and only be condos or co-ops. What matters is that the legal framework within which profit-seeking businesses operate must be appropriately calibrated to prevent vulture capitalists from running amok.
Having lived in pleasant rental apartments as well as in hellholes, I doubt that the difference lies in the hearts of the owners to whom I sent my monthly checks. As my financial situation has improved over the course of my lifetime, I have been able to put myself into situations with relative balance between the contracting parties. But owners of relatively high-end housing are responding to legal rules that people like me have the political clout to create and enforce.
As it stands, then, both driverless cars and corporate ownership of single-family homes are the latest examples of what goes wrong when we let the chaos of the Wild West rule the day. That is not at all a reason to give up on politics, which would simply allow the exploitative insanity to get worse. The only response to unbalanced policy choices by politicians is to pressure those politicians to create a fair and sustainable equilibrium.
And that, as it happens, is a nice place to end this column, because in its way today's discussion sets the table for the conclusion of my more overtly political "Now We'll See Whether the Democratic Establishment Truly Cares About Democracy" column next week.
- Neil H. Buchanan