Yahoo Autos When Cars Are Autonomous, Will We Even Need Driver's Licenses?
From the September 2016 issue
Back before the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, when caring for the environment meant dumping your used motor oil on rural gravel roads, my father would drive our black VW Bug to the Olentangy River, near Delaware, Ohio. We’d head for the middle of the river—never more than about eight inches deep—where my father would wash the VW and I’d hunt for albino box turtles.
When I think about truly new cars, I think about autonomous cars—the L5s that require no human input. And you know what? I don’t think they’re gonna allow any river soirees. In fact, this whole subject is a festival of question marks.
For instance: Let’s say you’re on a ramp trying to merge onto an interstate. You glance over your shoulder and see two 18-wheelers side by side. Your brain tells you, “Hey, I can make this work if I bury the throttle to merge ahead of those trucks.” But what will an autonomous car’s brain think? Will it know what’s shaping up in the rearview mirrors? What if, to merge safely, you briefly have to exceed the speed limit? Will your self-driving pod even allow that?
Or imagine you’re humming along and, up ahead, a guy on the right is pulling out of his driveway. I’ve saved myself thousands of auto-body dollars by staring at that guy’s face to see if he’s looking at me. But will an autonomous car derive any information at all from that fellow’s carefree mug?
Given that autonomous cars will “see” so much better than humans, especially at night, will we then welcome back a sloppy ocean of DUI convictees who are currently in forced retirement? What about my deaf 92-year-old Uncle Seth, who last lost his license waiting through two stoplight cycles so he could jam a plug of Mail Pouch in his mouth? By the way, Uncle Seth was fond of his Mad Dog 20/20. If the car of the future does all the thinking, will he legally be able to chug the fruity contents while in transit to the bingo semifinals? If so, then blind folks, too, right? And how about the seriously disturbed in mind and hygiene? How about all of Mrs. Hastings’s most evil fourth graders? Will this be the end of everyone’s driver’s licenses and the start of mandatory national ID cards? Will self-driving pods put a terminal squeeze on light rail and buses? Will road-use tax be baked into our utility bills? And if we welcome back everybody to America’s roads, will we be creating the very traffic snarls that driving pods were, in part, intended to obviate?
When there’s no steering wheel in a car, well, to me that’s an elevator or a train, and look how many Amtrak coaches have gone shooting like comets into various tidal basins. Will an autonomous car recognize a cop standing on the berm, gesturing for you to pull over? No? Well, if the car doesn’t “see” Officer Snotfuller, remember this: The one thing cops hate more than flies in their Big Gulps is a civilian who doesn’t instantly obey their commands. Can you spell TASER? Except it won’t be a TASER, because all future cops will wave a magic-wand master-kill switch that, once aimed in your direction, will kill your little pod deader than Karl and Groucho Marx combined.
And, if every car relies on GPS, how hard will it be for the cops to determine you’re at McShane’s Lounge? You can bet the police will have a national database such that a few keystrokes answer that question. Or will it inspire the radar-detector manufacturers to sell little black boxes that scramble your GPS coordinates?
Speaking of cops, will they, too, conduct business in their own automated pods? I hope so. I say that because, after 800 episodes of Cops, I can’t ever remember an officer driving with both hands on the wheel. Apparently they save all their concentration for cracked taillights.
Will autonomous cars allow any owner maintenance at all, other than checking tire pressures? Will that be the end of high-school mechanics’ shops? Or if your pod is shared, who among its drivers is the tire-pressure watcher? If the pods all look alike, there’s little incentive to own one outright, at which point we’ll treat our vehicles like Budget rentals and you’ll have to use a shovel to find the floors.
I’ll bet the only way to increase an autonomous pod’s performance is to remove weight. So I can see myself saber-sawing out the back seat and creating a company called “Pulled Me Once” that sells two-ounce carbon-fiber door pulls.
To me, it all sounds like driving a really big iPhone, a square dance of algorithms. We’re gonna need “Driving Parks” to which we can trailer our Subaru WRXs for a day of thoughtless speed and whopper insurance premiums. But I must say I’m optimistic about L5 pods’ potential to save 30,000 American lives each year.
Isn’t it ironic that we’d apply such engineering, intellect, dedication, and costly resources to reach that outcome, yet we express so little interest in reducing a like number of annual gun deaths? We are funny people. Hilarious, even.
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