The Demise of Driving
I enjoy driving a car. Hands on the wheel, feet on the pedals, eyes on the road. Full enjoyment comes with a manual transmission while running through hills and bends. Decelerate into the curve, find the perfect line, sweep through the apex at just the right speed, and accelerate out. Upshift, downshift, use the sound of the engine as your guide. With the right touch on the clutch, change gears so smoothly that the coffee in your cupholder barely registers the transition. You feel the road. The car is an extension of your body.
But, the days are numbered for such a driving experience. There is an oncoming rush to put self-driving cars on our streets and highways. It is building slowly through individual safety and convenience widgets. Collectively, these are called advanced driver assistance systems and they include currently advertised features such as lane departure warnings, blind-spot detection, collision avoidance braking, adaptive cruise control, and auto-dimming headlights. Tie all those to a GPS navigation system and you are well on the way to a nap in the back seat while the car delivers you to your destination.
Plenty of people would prefer not to drive. They find the act boring, scary, or irritating. Their eyes light up at the prospect of turning the duty over to an electronic brain behind the dashboard. They could use drive time for texting, playing games, conversing with other passengers, or simply chilling out. The car can drop them at the front of the store and go find its own parking spot.
And, it’s not a matter of mere convenience. Plenty of people should not be allowed to drive. Whether drunk, distracted, or lacking in ability, the driver remains the top contributor to deaths on U.S. highways. When the roads are filled with autonomous vehicles, all sensing their surroundings and communicating with each other, the number of accidents, injuries, and fatalities will likely drop dramatically.
Carmakers are already responding to market interest for the “next big thing”; they will manufacture what will generate money. This will evolve toward full automation and, slowly, drive-it-yourself versions will hold a smaller and smaller share of available vehicles. In addition, in the name of safety, there will inevitably be pressure to make all cars autonomous, especially once manually driven cars fall into the minority on the roads.
I confess to using use cruise control on long, dull drives down the Interstate, but that’s as far as I want to go in conceding to electronic sensors and computer control. I’m not saying that self-driving cars are necessarily a bad thing. What I am saying is please don’t cut me off from doing it my way. I still want to feel the road.
