The preoccupation of the ruling elite with restricting cars underscores their disconnect with the people they serve. They can walk, bike or take the subway to their job 10 blocks away, but that’s not possible for people outside the downtown core. Most people need an inexpensive, reliable, independent form of transportation.
In the UK the people in Government can use the transport systems in London – metros, railways, light railways, buses, taxis, bike hire. In a large city with plenty of people travelling it makes sense to promote public transport. Politicians assume these facilities are common elsewhere.
But outside London cities normally have fewer and less frequent options for public transport and villages just a few miles outside the city may have no public transport available at all.
Logically people who live in a city but use private transport should pay a congestion charge for they have alternative means of travel…. and people who live outside the city and must use private transport should be exempt. Strangely the inverse seems to hold.
Living in London, these are the reasons I had to use a car:
– go to the airport or tube station (when in a rush to catch a train or with luggage)
– Going to the hospital
– Dropping off daughter to school or activities
– Rushing home to pick up daughter ( travel time by car well below one hour, public transport 1.5 hours)
Remind me, which of these are substitutable by a cycle or train?
And remember, even in London, where car traffic is bad and with extensive public transport, using a car often halves the time spent on travelling. Goes without saying, even worse outside.
And, of course, while the beloved mayor is openly hostile to car drivers, London has also cut back on public transport – and in any case trains are on strike every few weeks.
These are all convenient – other than the hospital. While you may enjoy using a car for these reasons, many others in the downtown core won’t. For those farther removed, they literally could not exist without it.
Can’t disagree that those others need cars even more, and are criminally neglected by planners and politicians.
But that’s just the point, even for us city folk, who are much better placed, it’s tough and not just an inconvenience not to be able to use cars.
For instance, if I have to pick up the daughter without using a car, the extra 30-45 mins using public transport means leaving that important late office meeting or being late to pick her up. Not ideal, either way.
Quite so. But how many MPs and senior Civil Service managers have direct childcare responsibilities? Not many I’d guess – so your concerns however justified are not their concerns.
My car is presently having work done in the garage, preventing me from visiting my elderly mother and stepfather.
Carlos Danger
7 months ago
What is the future of driverless cars? It’s hard to say. Predictions about the future are best left to grifters and charlatans (and Elon Musk), and not treated seriously. We should keep our options open instead of making huge and risky bets on how the future is going to turn out.
That’s a lesson few people have learned. So far the driverless car industry has seen the most investment with no return in history. Money has poured by the billions of dollars into the industry and even the revenues from the technology are a tiny trickle, with profits only a dream for the far future.
Not smart. Not smart at all.
I suggest you educate yourself about progress in machine intelligence. It has started to become exponential in the past 2 years and fully autonomous driving is likely to be available within 10 years
I live and work in Silicon Valley and one of the things I work on is computer-driven cars, including holding a patent on an aspect of the technology.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have progressed, but the progress has been far from exponential. The hype surpasses the reality. No one can predict when and to what extent computer-driven cars will be feasible. We can only wait and see what happens.
“I live and work in Silicon Valley and one of the things I work on is computer-driven cars, including holding a patent on an aspect of the technology.”
No you don’t.
What are the specifics that you disagree with?
Get to the specifics, and make counter-arguments. That is how people above the age of 16 usually try to engage with ideas or arguments.
Carlos made a point about wasted investment on driverless cars; so far.
Problem is not whether driverless cars will be available within 10 years but whether people should be forced to use them because of political decisions taken without democratic oversight.
“It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars.”
Doesn’t that speak volumes.
Simon Neale
7 months ago
The point about autonomy while driving also touches on the important issues of safety, and solitude. In a car, there are lots of social interactions that you are free from, but which can be annoying or incredibly scary on public transport. Travelling alone at night, many people feel safer in a mobile metal box with the ability to contact others or move away from the scaries and oddballs. And, although I never drive purely for pleasure, there are times when I just enjoy driving somewhere because it gets me a few minutes or hours of being alone.
Karen Arnold
7 months ago
Every politician who advocates reducing access to cars and road use should be forced to try to live their normal life in a rural county or in the suburbs for at least a month. Perhaps then they may start to understand the point of view of the majority of the population.
James Kirk
7 months ago
UK towns evolved in the horse drawn era. Driverless cars would need to be stored, charged and maintained out of town, the stables and mews long converted to human occupation. It may relieve the narrow streets of cold idle parked up cars, unused 90% of the time but there would still be traffic jams on the M25, M60 and A1 North at peak times and bank holidays. And don’t forget the hackers. Crime moves apace.
Jeff Butcher
7 months ago
‘ There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. ‘
Matt has clearly never seen car after car stuck in traffic in South London of a morning, the populace gawping into their smartphones as they knock back their Starbucks….
Julian Newman
7 months ago
Most of the comments up to now ignore the most important issue highlighted by the discussion, i.e. the connection between driving, self-realisation and intelligibility.
If driving is how you achieve self-realization then I feel very sorry for you and the incredibly sad lives you must lead.
Last edited 7 months ago by Champagne Socialist
Alabama Slamma
7 months ago
What Crawford says about the experience of “feeling the road” is what you get with a sports car. I didn’t realize it until I bought one, and experienced the feeling of the car being an extension of one’s own body. It is said of Formula 1 cars and Indycars that the driver does not get in the car; rather, the driver puts the car on.
As far as cities banning automobiles: once they have accomplished this, don’t think for a minute that other forms of mechanical transport won’t be targeted next. I recall reading a Popular Science article from an issue in the late 1960s, about the “utopian” city of the future. A main point in the description was the proud boast that the average citizen will be outside of their own neighborhood only twice in their lives: once when they are born and brought home from the hospital, and once when their body is taken to the cemetery. Transportation of any form would be strictly limited to VIPs.
Colorado UnHerd
7 months ago
Fascinating and — obviously — about so much more than driverless cars. Crawford sounds here like both poet and prophet: “A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. … (Constructed worlds) will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency … maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery.”
It seems to me that — if we are to be mentally healthy individuals and a capable, engaged species — our default allegiance must be to inexhaustibly rich reality, not these ever-evolving and distracting technologies. We need to feel actual agency and involvement, not representations.
Thanks so much for this interview.
You make a perceptive comment. Matthew Crawford’s books have intrigued me since I read the first one, Shop Class as Soulcraft, almost 15 years ago. The World Beyond Your Head was good too, and Why We Drive was right on point with what I was researching at the time. I’ve been glad to read his very occasional columns here on Unherd, too.
Matthew Crawford reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and who Matthew Crawford has written about.
Last edited 7 months ago by Carlos Danger
Charles Stanhope
7 months ago
My diesel ‘Panzerwagen’ is currently crossing France, and averaging 53.3 miles per gallon.
James Kirk
7 months ago
Wall-E was more a comment on present day overweight couch potatoes on the teat of the welfare state, the piles of over consumption round the back ignored. The symbolic ship’s captain controlled by an AI dictator programmed never to return to unpleasant reality. We need a Wall-E, assisted by an EVA. We have the cockroaches, thanks.
Champagne Socialist
7 months ago
The picture at the top of this article is revealing. While most of the Clarkson wannabes who comment here will picture themselves as good looking and freewheeling tough guys like Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, cruising the LA freeways in a cool ride, listening to classic rock and picking up pretty hippie girls, the reality is that you are overweight, balding middle aged men driving to the supermarket in a Hyundai somewhere awful like Milton Keynes or Cheltenham.
Pretty comical.
Upvote from me. Actually made me laugh. You forgot the viagra in the glove compartment though. Seriously – more like this please. Entertaining, to the point, and so much better than the silly throwaways you usually litter the comments section with.
Andrew F
7 months ago
Quasi-religious article.
I agree that rich, green blob wants to stop working and middle class people driving, flying, having holidays, eating meat etc.
However his other points are not very convincing.
Surely, if there was great demand for cars without electronic gizmos, someone would respond to demand.
Some, niche companies do (like Caterham) but so what?
My brother is petrol head who thinks nothing about driving 1k miles in a day across Europe.
I prefer my wine, craft beer and whisky to driving.
I can understand attraction of driving on racing circuit or rally driving.
But stuck in traffic at 20mph in London?
Surely, not having to pretend to drive is preferable.
No idea what stats say but majority of people would surely prefer not to drive in commuting scenario?
I am against imposition of self driving cars on us.
But if cars could have both steering wheel and be able to drive autonomously, what is wrong with this?
Author sounds like my hifi mates who still believe that music reply is best done on record deck.
Julie Lynn
3 months ago
Anyone who works in a trade, or on the land, needs a vehicle really, because we tend to carry a load of usually heavy tools/equipment. We need a car which can be driven in remote areas with no signal or internet, and fixed easily by oneself e.g. if driving offroad. You need a van, pickup truck or Land Rover-type 4×4 to carry all your tools. So our workhorses could never be driverless or wired into the digital ether. So many white collar city-dwellers and people in government forget this.
Champagne Socialist
7 months ago
I feel sorry for the incels who require a car to feel “manly”.
Billy Bob
7 months ago
I’m quite looking forward to driverless cars personally. It means I can get drunk or have a kip (or both) and not have to worry about it.
All those ideas of speeding round long open roads on trips very rarely match reality anyway, you usually spend half your journey stuck behind a caravan doing half the speed limit while getting slowly more irate at the world
Cabs exist. You can get drunk or have a kip (or both) now and have a drivered car take you home. And you’ll still get stuck behind a caravan on your long journey in a driverless car.
Things won’t change all that much if computers rule the road. In fact, they may get worse. Being a passive passenger is not all that fun. When my family takes long car trips now we trade off turns at the wheel, and among the four of us we always have one or two ready to take a turn driving at any time. Within limits, of course, we all like to drive. Especially since our car takes some skill to drive, with a lot of feedback from the road.
Rather than a computer taking over all driving, I’d like to see a good mixture of human and computer sharing the driving task, like there used to be with a human and horse together piloting down the road. Sometimes on tight rein with the human in charge, sometimes on loose rein with the horse given its head. Don Norman in his book The Design of Normal Things and this interviewee Matthew Crawford in his book Why We Drive talk a lot of sense about this topic.
To me, that human-computer sharing is the ideal. I would hate to climb in a car and not have any control over it. No steering wheel? No pedals? What if the car goes crazy? My mind boggles at the thought.
Cabs are not always available and are absent in most non urban locations. Robotaxis, requiring no human labour which is a scarce commodity, could be universally available . They will also be cheaper as the removal of the labour element lowers costs and the gain will be shared between operator ( as profit) and consumer as lower prices to help build up volume in the short tern
It won’t work like that. Prices will stay the same (as having been established at what the market will bear) and operators will simply make more profit. The shareholder is king now.
Its not that simple. They need to reduce prices to get people switching and their size means that their shareholders and creditors have no choice but to go along with the strategy. The shareholder is not king in mega corporations
Clearly not true bases on competition in taxi services in London.
Many options are much cheaper than black cabs.
Prices will not stay the same if you allow competition.
Robotaxis will be like ATMs and self checkout at the supermarket. A soulless often frustrating encounter with the machine. Rigid and controlling, suffocating the human, devoid of empathy. Your smartphone dies or your ID fails the machine will ruthlessly refuse it’s service. A human will take stock of the situation and act with empathy. I’d sure not like to rely on a robotaxi in Alaska at midnight when my smartphone has just died!. Any fellow human – on the other hand – would probably help.
I’ve experienced this first hand. Credit cards failed because I had not alerted bank I was going abroad. I could not top up Skype to make phone call and had no cash. Could not make phone call with existing US service provider either. I was frozen out of system completely. No hotel, no food, no travel possible. I went to local police station where a very nice police officer allowed me to make a phone call to my US bank. Sure I made some – human – mistakes. The machines however ruthlessly shut me down. A human understood and fixed it instant.
Human labor being scarce? Perhaps it’s time to allow hundreds of thousands of new “immigrants” or “asylum seekers” to skirt the law and enter the kingdom?
So you’re happy to be a passenger in a car driven by a complete stranger, with human error being a well known cause of accidents, yet would feel unsafe in an automated one?
I’m intrigued, are you happy for planes to fly on autopilot, or would you rather everything was done manually by the pilot even if this increased the risk considerably?
I’m not usually one for obsessing over new technology, the likes of Alexa I just find pointless but if autopiloted cars caused accidents to significantly decrease whilst allowing the would be driver to be working/sleeping/watching films I’m all for it
Noone ever considers those people who cannot work, read or even watch films in cars (or buses) because they get motion sickness. I can only drive in a car, talk or stare out the window. I’d rather drive myself thanks.
Whether computer drivers would do better at safe driving than a hybrid of human-computer drivers is an unanswered question. Planes are never turned over completely to autopilots. The pilots still have controls. “Driverless” cars would not.
But I’m more interested in the issue of who controls the computers. If computers take complete control of our cars there are two big problems. One is that with machine learning no one knows what a computer will do in all situations. There’s no way to know.
Another is that someone controls the computer driver, and we car owners and passengers are not it. Someone like Elon Musk owns your Tesla, you are just using it. Read the license agreement you sign and you will see that is true.
That lack of control opens the door for problems to come in. “Open the pod-bay doors, HAL” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
In todays news in the UK is a story of a man whose new ell electric car suffered a catastrophic system failure – the brakes wouldn’t work. He had to call the police as an emergency who helped him come to a stop by using their van to allow him to drive into it and use it to bring him to a stop. That is just an electric car, not even driverless car, at least with a driver operated car he could have used gears (even in an automatic) to slow the car.
Have you driven across a country like the United States? I have. Three times. I loved it. There definitely is a sense of adventure and the open road. If I were younger and up to doing it again, I would absolutely love to do so.
Sure – driving can be enjoyable, and especially in contexts like the one you describe. But in congested cities it’s self created nightmare. It really doesn’t work well.
Maurice Frank
7 months ago
Ridiculous. Sad to that unherd has become a bog standard conservative outlet.
Agree. At its best it publishes some good articles. At its worst it veers between feminist rag, and here a sort of Tory GQ.
The sentiments read like someone has had their brains replaced with advertising copy. The thing about cars is that if everybody has them they go from the joy promoted by the admen to a congestion nightmare. And the people driving them (contrast cyclists) don’t look full of joy and power – they look miserable, trapped, isolated in their tin boxes.
Douglas Redmayne
7 months ago
Self driving cars and robotaxis are coming whether Crawford likes it or not. They are estimated to be fully autonomous within 10 years once AGI has arrived and they will improve road safety by taking away power from irresponsible w humans. As for the Wall E future, that isn’t unlikely but if its what gives people pleasure then its not the business of a puritannical American to stop it in the name of an individualist ideology of “ freedom “.
‘They are estimated….’ – do you have a solid reference for that vast claim? I remember when they were ‘estimated’ to be available a decade ago. Also, ‘..if it gives people pleasure’ needs a bit more definition – as a vague generalisation it’s a remarkably poor reason to sweep away anything, much less other peoples’ freedoms.
The estimation comes from people in the tech industry and is by no means a consensus but most expect it within 10 years for the very good technical reason that intelligence seems to emerge from neural nets as more computing power is applied. If an assisted existence gives people pleasure and is at zero cost because robotics has made manual Labour redundant then this will not sweep anybody’s freedom away as they will not be affected. Anyone who dislikes it will be free to reject the offer but they will not be free to prevent it being available to those who desire it.
The preoccupation of the ruling elite with restricting cars underscores their disconnect with the people they serve. They can walk, bike or take the subway to their job 10 blocks away, but that’s not possible for people outside the downtown core. Most people need an inexpensive, reliable, independent form of transportation.
In the UK the people in Government can use the transport systems in London – metros, railways, light railways, buses, taxis, bike hire. In a large city with plenty of people travelling it makes sense to promote public transport. Politicians assume these facilities are common elsewhere.
But outside London cities normally have fewer and less frequent options for public transport and villages just a few miles outside the city may have no public transport available at all.
Logically people who live in a city but use private transport should pay a congestion charge for they have alternative means of travel…. and people who live outside the city and must use private transport should be exempt. Strangely the inverse seems to hold.
Living in London, these are the reasons I had to use a car:
– go to the airport or tube station (when in a rush to catch a train or with luggage)
– Going to the hospital
– Dropping off daughter to school or activities
– Rushing home to pick up daughter ( travel time by car well below one hour, public transport 1.5 hours)
Remind me, which of these are substitutable by a cycle or train?
And remember, even in London, where car traffic is bad and with extensive public transport, using a car often halves the time spent on travelling. Goes without saying, even worse outside.
And, of course, while the beloved mayor is openly hostile to car drivers, London has also cut back on public transport – and in any case trains are on strike every few weeks.
These are all convenient – other than the hospital. While you may enjoy using a car for these reasons, many others in the downtown core won’t. For those farther removed, they literally could not exist without it.
Can’t disagree that those others need cars even more, and are criminally neglected by planners and politicians.
But that’s just the point, even for us city folk, who are much better placed, it’s tough and not just an inconvenience not to be able to use cars.
For instance, if I have to pick up the daughter without using a car, the extra 30-45 mins using public transport means leaving that important late office meeting or being late to pick her up. Not ideal, either way.
Quite so. But how many MPs and senior Civil Service managers have direct childcare responsibilities? Not many I’d guess – so your concerns however justified are not their concerns.
My car is presently having work done in the garage, preventing me from visiting my elderly mother and stepfather.
What is the future of driverless cars? It’s hard to say. Predictions about the future are best left to grifters and charlatans (and Elon Musk), and not treated seriously. We should keep our options open instead of making huge and risky bets on how the future is going to turn out.
That’s a lesson few people have learned. So far the driverless car industry has seen the most investment with no return in history. Money has poured by the billions of dollars into the industry and even the revenues from the technology are a tiny trickle, with profits only a dream for the far future.
Not smart. Not smart at all.
I suggest you educate yourself about progress in machine intelligence. It has started to become exponential in the past 2 years and fully autonomous driving is likely to be available within 10 years
I live and work in Silicon Valley and one of the things I work on is computer-driven cars, including holding a patent on an aspect of the technology.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have progressed, but the progress has been far from exponential. The hype surpasses the reality. No one can predict when and to what extent computer-driven cars will be feasible. We can only wait and see what happens.
“I live and work in Silicon Valley and one of the things I work on is computer-driven cars, including holding a patent on an aspect of the technology.”
No you don’t.
Yes, I do. Don’t be fooled by the fact that you can’t find my patent under the name Carlos Danger. That’s not my real name.
That’s the permanent troll, it occupies the UnHerd comments section. Just a minor nuisance
No, you don’t.
Your moronic comments are not those of someone who has any knowledge of AI or any other form of tech. You obviously don’t have a clue.
By that logic – don’t you have some bins to collect?
Don’t try to understand, Dave. Way above your pay grade. Assuming you have a job which is being pretty generous of me!
What are the specifics that you disagree with?
Get to the specifics, and make counter-arguments. That is how people above the age of 16 usually try to engage with ideas or arguments.
Carlos made a point about wasted investment on driverless cars; so far.
Problem is not whether driverless cars will be available within 10 years but whether people should be forced to use them because of political decisions taken without democratic oversight.
“It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars.”
Doesn’t that speak volumes.
The point about autonomy while driving also touches on the important issues of safety, and solitude. In a car, there are lots of social interactions that you are free from, but which can be annoying or incredibly scary on public transport. Travelling alone at night, many people feel safer in a mobile metal box with the ability to contact others or move away from the scaries and oddballs. And, although I never drive purely for pleasure, there are times when I just enjoy driving somewhere because it gets me a few minutes or hours of being alone.
Every politician who advocates reducing access to cars and road use should be forced to try to live their normal life in a rural county or in the suburbs for at least a month. Perhaps then they may start to understand the point of view of the majority of the population.
UK towns evolved in the horse drawn era. Driverless cars would need to be stored, charged and maintained out of town, the stables and mews long converted to human occupation. It may relieve the narrow streets of cold idle parked up cars, unused 90% of the time but there would still be traffic jams on the M25, M60 and A1 North at peak times and bank holidays. And don’t forget the hackers. Crime moves apace.
‘ There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. ‘
Matt has clearly never seen car after car stuck in traffic in South London of a morning, the populace gawping into their smartphones as they knock back their Starbucks….
Most of the comments up to now ignore the most important issue highlighted by the discussion, i.e. the connection between driving, self-realisation and intelligibility.
I agree. Sadly, the generations born prior to c.1990 may be the last to understand the idea of driving as self-realisation.
If driving is how you achieve self-realization then I feel very sorry for you and the incredibly sad lives you must lead.
What Crawford says about the experience of “feeling the road” is what you get with a sports car. I didn’t realize it until I bought one, and experienced the feeling of the car being an extension of one’s own body. It is said of Formula 1 cars and Indycars that the driver does not get in the car; rather, the driver puts the car on.
As far as cities banning automobiles: once they have accomplished this, don’t think for a minute that other forms of mechanical transport won’t be targeted next. I recall reading a Popular Science article from an issue in the late 1960s, about the “utopian” city of the future. A main point in the description was the proud boast that the average citizen will be outside of their own neighborhood only twice in their lives: once when they are born and brought home from the hospital, and once when their body is taken to the cemetery. Transportation of any form would be strictly limited to VIPs.
Fascinating and — obviously — about so much more than driverless cars. Crawford sounds here like both poet and prophet: “A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. … (Constructed worlds) will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency … maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery.”
It seems to me that — if we are to be mentally healthy individuals and a capable, engaged species — our default allegiance must be to inexhaustibly rich reality, not these ever-evolving and distracting technologies. We need to feel actual agency and involvement, not representations.
Thanks so much for this interview.
You make a perceptive comment. Matthew Crawford’s books have intrigued me since I read the first one, Shop Class as Soulcraft, almost 15 years ago. The World Beyond Your Head was good too, and Why We Drive was right on point with what I was researching at the time. I’ve been glad to read his very occasional columns here on Unherd, too.
Matthew Crawford reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and who Matthew Crawford has written about.
My diesel ‘Panzerwagen’ is currently crossing France, and averaging 53.3 miles per gallon.
Wall-E was more a comment on present day overweight couch potatoes on the teat of the welfare state, the piles of over consumption round the back ignored. The symbolic ship’s captain controlled by an AI dictator programmed never to return to unpleasant reality. We need a Wall-E, assisted by an EVA. We have the cockroaches, thanks.
The picture at the top of this article is revealing. While most of the Clarkson wannabes who comment here will picture themselves as good looking and freewheeling tough guys like Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, cruising the LA freeways in a cool ride, listening to classic rock and picking up pretty hippie girls, the reality is that you are overweight, balding middle aged men driving to the supermarket in a Hyundai somewhere awful like Milton Keynes or Cheltenham.
Pretty comical.
Speak for yourself.
Upvote from me. Actually made me laugh. You forgot the viagra in the glove compartment though. Seriously – more like this please. Entertaining, to the point, and so much better than the silly throwaways you usually litter the comments section with.
Quasi-religious article.
I agree that rich, green blob wants to stop working and middle class people driving, flying, having holidays, eating meat etc.
However his other points are not very convincing.
Surely, if there was great demand for cars without electronic gizmos, someone would respond to demand.
Some, niche companies do (like Caterham) but so what?
My brother is petrol head who thinks nothing about driving 1k miles in a day across Europe.
I prefer my wine, craft beer and whisky to driving.
I can understand attraction of driving on racing circuit or rally driving.
But stuck in traffic at 20mph in London?
Surely, not having to pretend to drive is preferable.
No idea what stats say but majority of people would surely prefer not to drive in commuting scenario?
I am against imposition of self driving cars on us.
But if cars could have both steering wheel and be able to drive autonomously, what is wrong with this?
Author sounds like my hifi mates who still believe that music reply is best done on record deck.
Anyone who works in a trade, or on the land, needs a vehicle really, because we tend to carry a load of usually heavy tools/equipment. We need a car which can be driven in remote areas with no signal or internet, and fixed easily by oneself e.g. if driving offroad. You need a van, pickup truck or Land Rover-type 4×4 to carry all your tools. So our workhorses could never be driverless or wired into the digital ether. So many white collar city-dwellers and people in government forget this.
I feel sorry for the incels who require a car to feel “manly”.
I’m quite looking forward to driverless cars personally. It means I can get drunk or have a kip (or both) and not have to worry about it.
All those ideas of speeding round long open roads on trips very rarely match reality anyway, you usually spend half your journey stuck behind a caravan doing half the speed limit while getting slowly more irate at the world
Cabs exist. You can get drunk or have a kip (or both) now and have a drivered car take you home. And you’ll still get stuck behind a caravan on your long journey in a driverless car.
Things won’t change all that much if computers rule the road. In fact, they may get worse. Being a passive passenger is not all that fun. When my family takes long car trips now we trade off turns at the wheel, and among the four of us we always have one or two ready to take a turn driving at any time. Within limits, of course, we all like to drive. Especially since our car takes some skill to drive, with a lot of feedback from the road.
Rather than a computer taking over all driving, I’d like to see a good mixture of human and computer sharing the driving task, like there used to be with a human and horse together piloting down the road. Sometimes on tight rein with the human in charge, sometimes on loose rein with the horse given its head. Don Norman in his book The Design of Normal Things and this interviewee Matthew Crawford in his book Why We Drive talk a lot of sense about this topic.
To me, that human-computer sharing is the ideal. I would hate to climb in a car and not have any control over it. No steering wheel? No pedals? What if the car goes crazy? My mind boggles at the thought.
Cabs are not always available and are absent in most non urban locations. Robotaxis, requiring no human labour which is a scarce commodity, could be universally available . They will also be cheaper as the removal of the labour element lowers costs and the gain will be shared between operator ( as profit) and consumer as lower prices to help build up volume in the short tern
It won’t work like that. Prices will stay the same (as having been established at what the market will bear) and operators will simply make more profit. The shareholder is king now.
Its not that simple. They need to reduce prices to get people switching and their size means that their shareholders and creditors have no choice but to go along with the strategy. The shareholder is not king in mega corporations
They only need government mandates and government subsidies to get people to switch. And, I strongly suspect that is the route that will be taken.
Clearly not true bases on competition in taxi services in London.
Many options are much cheaper than black cabs.
Prices will not stay the same if you allow competition.
Robotaxis will be like ATMs and self checkout at the supermarket. A soulless often frustrating encounter with the machine. Rigid and controlling, suffocating the human, devoid of empathy. Your smartphone dies or your ID fails the machine will ruthlessly refuse it’s service. A human will take stock of the situation and act with empathy. I’d sure not like to rely on a robotaxi in Alaska at midnight when my smartphone has just died!. Any fellow human – on the other hand – would probably help.
I’ve experienced this first hand. Credit cards failed because I had not alerted bank I was going abroad. I could not top up Skype to make phone call and had no cash. Could not make phone call with existing US service provider either. I was frozen out of system completely. No hotel, no food, no travel possible. I went to local police station where a very nice police officer allowed me to make a phone call to my US bank. Sure I made some – human – mistakes. The machines however ruthlessly shut me down. A human understood and fixed it instant.
Imagine if Alexa overheard you say something disapproving about Black Lives Matter.
Human labor being scarce? Perhaps it’s time to allow hundreds of thousands of new “immigrants” or “asylum seekers” to skirt the law and enter the kingdom?
So you’re happy to be a passenger in a car driven by a complete stranger, with human error being a well known cause of accidents, yet would feel unsafe in an automated one?
I’m intrigued, are you happy for planes to fly on autopilot, or would you rather everything was done manually by the pilot even if this increased the risk considerably?
I’m not usually one for obsessing over new technology, the likes of Alexa I just find pointless but if autopiloted cars caused accidents to significantly decrease whilst allowing the would be driver to be working/sleeping/watching films I’m all for it
Noone ever considers those people who cannot work, read or even watch films in cars (or buses) because they get motion sickness. I can only drive in a car, talk or stare out the window. I’d rather drive myself thanks.
Me too. For some reason I get very gloomy being a passive passenger in long road trips.
Whether computer drivers would do better at safe driving than a hybrid of human-computer drivers is an unanswered question. Planes are never turned over completely to autopilots. The pilots still have controls. “Driverless” cars would not.
But I’m more interested in the issue of who controls the computers. If computers take complete control of our cars there are two big problems. One is that with machine learning no one knows what a computer will do in all situations. There’s no way to know.
Another is that someone controls the computer driver, and we car owners and passengers are not it. Someone like Elon Musk owns your Tesla, you are just using it. Read the license agreement you sign and you will see that is true.
That lack of control opens the door for problems to come in. “Open the pod-bay doors, HAL” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
In todays news in the UK is a story of a man whose new ell electric car suffered a catastrophic system failure – the brakes wouldn’t work. He had to call the police as an emergency who helped him come to a stop by using their van to allow him to drive into it and use it to bring him to a stop. That is just an electric car, not even driverless car, at least with a driver operated car he could have used gears (even in an automatic) to slow the car.
I wonder how many fatal car accidents have happened in the time since this comment that have nothing to do with electric cars?
Amusing concept, a driverless caravan.
“My mind boggles at the thought”
This from the guy who claims to be working in Silicon Valley on driverless cars – hilarious!
Have you driven across a country like the United States? I have. Three times. I loved it. There definitely is a sense of adventure and the open road. If I were younger and up to doing it again, I would absolutely love to do so.
Sure – driving can be enjoyable, and especially in contexts like the one you describe. But in congested cities it’s self created nightmare. It really doesn’t work well.
Ridiculous. Sad to that unherd has become a bog standard conservative outlet.
Feel free to patronise The Guardian, New Statesman and the Daily Mirror.
Agree. At its best it publishes some good articles. At its worst it veers between feminist rag, and here a sort of Tory GQ.
The sentiments read like someone has had their brains replaced with advertising copy. The thing about cars is that if everybody has them they go from the joy promoted by the admen to a congestion nightmare. And the people driving them (contrast cyclists) don’t look full of joy and power – they look miserable, trapped, isolated in their tin boxes.
Self driving cars and robotaxis are coming whether Crawford likes it or not. They are estimated to be fully autonomous within 10 years once AGI has arrived and they will improve road safety by taking away power from irresponsible w humans. As for the Wall E future, that isn’t unlikely but if its what gives people pleasure then its not the business of a puritannical American to stop it in the name of an individualist ideology of “ freedom “.
‘They are estimated….’ – do you have a solid reference for that vast claim? I remember when they were ‘estimated’ to be available a decade ago. Also, ‘..if it gives people pleasure’ needs a bit more definition – as a vague generalisation it’s a remarkably poor reason to sweep away anything, much less other peoples’ freedoms.
The estimation comes from people in the tech industry and is by no means a consensus but most expect it within 10 years for the very good technical reason that intelligence seems to emerge from neural nets as more computing power is applied. If an assisted existence gives people pleasure and is at zero cost because robotics has made manual Labour redundant then this will not sweep anybody’s freedom away as they will not be affected. Anyone who dislikes it will be free to reject the offer but they will not be free to prevent it being available to those who desire it.
“Anyone who dislikes it will be free to reject the offer…?
Can I have that in writing, please?
Well stated. Some folks loved communism too.
You will make a very good comrade, or apparatchik, some day.