Driverless Cars Will Save The Joy Of Driving
Revolutionizing humanity’s mobility. Saving millions of lives each year. Cutting infrastructural and environmental waste to the tune of trillions of dollars annually. Introducing the first large-scale relationship between AI and humanity. All of this is inconsequential, because Johnny Jackass doesn’t want to let go of his steering wheel. Driving is apparently just too much fun.
Good enough, right? Shit, we were here first — screw that ground-breaking technology. Driving is an inalienable right, and if it ain’t… well that’s unconstitutional and we gotta change it. My cold dead hands, blah blah blah.
Of course, one could contest such arguments by paging through the history of humanity’s analogously “fun” activities, many of which sound quite entertaining when you remove any semblance of consequence or morality. I mean we could get really, really dark with the activities mankind has taken pleasure in if we ignore the costs involved.
We don’t need to go there, though. This article isn’t about what a complete dipshit Johnny is for selfishly protesting a trivial disruption of his druthers at the expense of monumental global progress. This article is about what a complete dipshit Johnny is for protesting a change that is bound to turn out in his favor.
A hundred years ago, driving the first cars must’ve felt like strapping on some super-human power suit. You instantly became the biggest, strongest, fastest thing on earth. That visceral experience still haunts us, which explains why people adore the feeling — and why our primitive brains have trouble coming to grips with the fact that we don’t actually have any super-human powers in an era when all humans have access to cars. We still get off on the sense of strength and speed, even as we’re boxed in by bumper-to-bumper traffic. We still get off on the inheritance of power.
That’s important to appreciate about ourselves, because it muddies our perspective. When we say we “love to drive”, there’s a lot of noise in that statement. Want to know how you can tell? Look at your keys. Is one of them the key to a motorcycle?
There is no excuse not to own a motorcycle if you truly love driving. No car you will ever own or sit in is as exhilarating as a used $4,000 Kawasaki Ninja. The difference is, bikes are dangerous. What’s that feeling? It’s not power… hell, you could end up painting the highway with your face should someone so much as swerve in your general direction. You definitely don’t feel power. No, it’s the dichotomy of anxiety and delight known as a “thrill”, and it happens every time you get on a bike. That’s fun. You’re not out to have fun in your car. You’re out to feel better about your ever-looming sense of impotence.
I bet you’ve started some virtual rebuttal at this point. Welp, just think back on all those times you judged a woman in an Escalade because she clearly needed a big hunk of metal to make her feel safe enough to enjoy her drive. That’s you, dipshit. You’re the Escalade to anyone on a bike.
Okay, so you want fun — but you don’t want to risk injury or discomfort, which means you want some kind of supervised, protected, castrated fun. Same here, my friend. What we both want is recreational racing.
Automotive racing was once as much an event as any sport or human feat. People were moving faster (and louder, and more dangerously) than they ever had, and it was mesmerizing. Jaguar’s sales went up 30% when they won LeMans in the 1950s. Do you know who won LeMans last year? Do you know what LeMans is? The average person and the television ratings say no.
Racing is a shell of what it once was, thanks ironically to the progress it’s made over the past century. Most of the mystique and danger have been engineered down to minutiae, while the cost to participate has ballooned out of reach for most folks, unless you love driving enough to blow your child support money on a weekend drag racer project.
Most racing series now regulate cars to be slower than they were decades ago. What? Where’s the fun in that? Well, there’s less fun, but there’s also less dying, and less passing out from the g-forces of vehicles we’re not capable of piloting. In short, we found our own limits… physical and moral alike.
That’s a big takeaway here: autonomous cars are not some rogue invention being worked on by clammy-handed nerds in Stanford; they’re the product of a century of collective automotive engineering progress, which made cars better and better until they eventually became better than us.
Forget million-dollar race cars. The modern-day consumer can buy a Honda whose software will out-shift, out-brake, out-corner, and out-analyze most humans on the road. And, as our latest engineering feats hit the market, we’ll be increasingly removed from driving’s decision-making processes, to the point that our only job will be to fart on the seat. That’s not something to pin on driverless cars. That’s just plain progress — the same progress which created cars in the first place, and created everything you love about them. Can’t have one without the other.
So, you’ve read this far. When do we get to the good news?
Thanks for your patience. Here you go.
It’s an empty parking lot, as you’ve surely surmised. Want to know how many empty parking lots there will be in a future of driverless cars? Well, count how many total parking lots we have in this country. It’s that number.
The introduction of usage-based self-driving fleets will put an end to the need for us to temporarily stash cars everywhere we take them, which means we’re looking at a huge chunk of paved, open space just waiting to be used. We can say the same for any B-roads that are less-than-optimal for commuting; those paved places aren’t needed by the traffic grid, which means we can use them for recreation. To take it further, remember that with a managed traffic grid, we could also divert traffic from any road at any time for the sake of giving us a recreational playground.
Then, there are the cars. Hundreds of millions of “antique” non-autonomous cars waiting around for a purpose, and thousands of people who enjoy working on them. Not to mention any new cars or replacement parts we could 3d print or manufacture on the cheap, given all the resources we’ve already built to serve the automotive market.
Okay; we’ve got product, location, and labor. All we need now to realize a dream of mass recreational driving is customers. Oh, hi there! Tell us again how much you love driving. Can you say it with money this time?
Racing and recreational driving — true fun, not that watered-down commuter crap you pass off as fun — is one of the most blatantly obvious peripheral opportunities autonomous vehicles present. In a future where nobody drives, what’s the benchmark for fun behind the wheel? The slowest econobox on the market today will be a roller coaster ride when it’s on us to take control. Kinda like how the most exciting roller coaster isn’t the fancy new twelve-loop 80mph upside-down one, but the shoddy old wooden one with the loose lap bar… because you need to get involved if you don’t want your head to smack into something.
So, you’ll be able to drive a car. Autocross it, drag race it, slalom it, j-turn it, drift it, put an obstacle course around it… you can do a million things with a car in an empty parking lot or an open road, and instead of investing countless hours and thousands of dollars into that kind of fun, you’ll be able to take a fifteen-minute trip to the local shopping mall, hand over $100, drive your brains out for an hour, and then go get a hot dog. Do it every weekend if you want. Hell, go get a side job as one of the instructors or mechanics, and watch people’s eyes light up every time you explain how to do a burnout.
It’s more pure driving fun than most of you have ever done in your lives. You’re welcome.
Meanwhile, in the world of high-stakes, high-budget racing: well, I’ve got good news to report on that front too.
Engineering feats are a big part of what makes racing fun to follow. Another facet of the appeal, of course, is risky driving behavior. Both will flourish in the new era of autonomous vehicle racing, as we move away from human-driven motorsports.
Imagine what engineers could do when they no longer have to worry about the safety of a human driver. Think about how much we’ll learn from seeing the cars experiment; how much data will be available; how much tweaking can be done.
Maybe the vehicles could repair themselves on the fly. Maybe we could have courses with aerial and underwater sections. And oh yeah, g-forces? As long as the thing crosses the finish line, it can disintegrate into oblivion ten feet later for all we care. For all it cares, too. Colin Chapman would be proud.
It’s almost as if we’ve given ourselves a restart on the history of racing. Anything is possible, and nothing is forbidden. That’s what racing was meant to be.
Rest assured: there will always be outlets for love of the journey over the destination. And, as long as humans enjoy beating each other over little more than a taste of sweet self-validation, there will always be racing.
