The Myths Surrounding the Automated Car Abound

From the November 2017 issue

Last year, I got a call from a strange outer-borough number. The voice on the line was immediately recognizable as America’s foremost lateral thinker, Malcolm Gladwell.

Turns out, he’s a C/D reader. He remembered the testing we’d done on unintended acceleration and wanted to do a piece for his Revisionist History podcast on why people are liable to press the wrong pedal in panic situations.

I guess he liked working with us, because he agreed to edit the bulk of our special feature package investigating the driverless car.

The driverless car has beguiled the sages and confounded the media mandarins for five years. The tech is here, right? Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, automated emergency braking, sentient steering—that’s all front-loaded into most every highly optioned new car on the road. So the fully automated car must be right around the corner, no? It’s actually here someone told me because they read something about Uber and Volvo in Pittsburgh, driving people around in robocars. Except, maybe that’s wrong.

Indeed, the myths surrounding the automated car abound, reinforced by a well-meaning press that has absolutely zero idea how the car business works, disclaimingly ignorant of the stock-driving power of overhyped new technology.

The myths are these: 1) The computer-driven car is already here. I’m sure a lot of Uber riders were disappointed to get into those Volvos in Pittsburgh only to find an actual human at the wheel. But the fully automated car’s delivery date keeps extending into the horizon, much like the obituary of the internal-combustion engine. 2) Okay, so maybe they’re not here yet, but when they get here, they’ll definitely drive you around all the time. To the contrary, there are various levels of automation, and it remains unclear whether the kind of semi-automation we have now—be it Autopilot or Super Cruise or Traffic Jam Pilot—will necessarily lead in an uninterrupted way to full automation. Our editorial deep dive asserts that it’s probably more realistic to think in terms of two parallel paths, with the driver aids in today’s upscale cars growing in sophistication, and the separate, fully automated technology relegated to domained areas due to the need for a predictable and matrixed environment where everything is talking to everything else—cars, pedestrians, road signs. 3) To the prior point, many think that computer-driven cars will eliminate the need for privately owned, human-driven cars. Imagine the requirements of the suburban parent, whose three kids are in five different activities, with last-minute changes to plans and routes, a galley’s worth of equipment at the ready for any kid-related event that might crop up. Can this person truly be served by the shared CitiCar, as depersonalized and germ-carrying as a rented tux? Doubtful. My view is that fully automated machines will be the small buses of the future, not the cars. Cars will be the things you drive.

There is so much we take for granted in our driving experience—the joy of controlling a car, the freedom it enables, the way it preserves individuality while masking identity. All that is wrapped up in this very complicated and unclear transition to this already not-so-new technology. To date, no one has looked at the transition in its entirety, taking into account all the regulatory, technical, and social challenges still to overcome. Who better than Gladwell to help us do that?