The Future of Driving

Photo by Andri Aeschlimann on Unsplash

Ever since The Jetsons first aired in 1962, Americans have been anticipating a future with flying cars. We haven’t gotten there yet. But we are getting close with regard to another futuristic driving mechanism: the self-driving car. The pace of progress toward fully automated vehicles has accelerated within the last year, almost to the point that I have been wondering lately whether my own kids (all still under the age of 13, but just barely) will actually ever have to learn how to drive a car, or if the future is advancing so fast that driving will be almost entirely automated by then. I suspect we’ll still be in-between for at least the next decade, but like I said, the future is coming fast.

On the Roads Today

Self-driving vehicles are not some far-off conceptual thing; they are on the roads right now. Perhaps the best-known example is Tesla, whose Full Self-Driving system is now being used by hundreds of thousands of drivers across North America. While it still requires the driver to remain attentive (in theory) and ready to take over at any moment, the technology is already capable of navigating city streets, highways, intersections, parking lots, and complex traffic situations with surprisingly little human intervention. There have been some high-profile fails of this system, although they were often during testing phases, and by all accounts the technology has improved significantly over the past year.

Equally impressive are companies like Waymo, whose robotaxi vehicles are already operating without human drivers behind the wheel in cities including Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. Passengers simply summon a vehicle through an app, climb into an empty driver’s seat, and let the car do the rest (often to their complete delight, numerous videos of which can now be found on YouTube). Millions of fully driverless rides have now taken place, with an increasing likelihood that these robotaxis will expand to many other cities and beyond in the months and years ahead.

Other automakers and technology companies including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Amazon’s Zoox, and several Chinese manufacturers are investing billions of dollars in autonomous driving. The race is on to see who can best perfect this technology (but also how quickly the public will embrace it).

Is This Trend a Positive One?

Admittedly, I actually kind of like to drive. I suspect many others feel the same way. For me, it’s not about the car itself, but the Zen state you can find yourself in on a long car ride. Some of my best ideas have come during “windshield time,” often listening to podcasts or just relaxing music.

I think something would definitely be lost if we end up in an entirely self-automated driving future. A feature of the trend will probably be some generational resistance to change, with older drivers (including me!) perhaps not giving up control of their steering wheels, while younger people who are coming of age will happily take the driverless ride. There will be an in-between for a while, until someday everyone is riding instead of driving.

There will be two primary benefits of a driverless future. The first is the value of our time. Even though I like to drive, like anyone I get tired after three- or four-hour trips, and as much value as I get out of listening to podcasts, I could still listen to those while simply riding in a driverless car. More likely, I could actually get some work done, read, play games with my kids on family trips, or sleep. It would be kind of like being on an airplane, just without all the extra time of having to get to an airport, wait to board, sit on the tarmac, and so on. The closer analogy would probably be riding on a train, but with the freedom to put in your destination’s coordinates and travel privately rather than being anchored to where the tracks go and surrounded by hundreds of commuters.

But the second benefit (and in many ways the more important one over the long haul) is safety. There are estimates that the lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are roughly one in 90 to one in 100, which is a remarkably significant number for something most Americans do nearly every day. Since we drive so much, the odds of dying on any single trip are extremely low, but in aggregate, human driving is one of the most dangerous activities most of us routinely undertake. Motor vehicle crashes remain one of the leading causes of accidental death in the United States and are the leading cause of death for teenagers (although, sadly, overdose deaths are catching up).

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the United States experiences roughly 11.5 traffic deaths per 100,000 people annually. Many of these deaths are due to human error, or some form of poor decision making, broadly defined. In fact, researchers estimate that human error contributes to more than 90% of serious crashes. People become distracted; they text, speed, drive while tired, they drive while drunk. Humans are just that — human beings, and we are prone to poor decisions. Computers, on the other hand, don’t get sleepy, they don’t glance down at notifications on their phones, and they don’t take unnecessary, irrational risks.

The challenge for society will be this: there will be crashes with self-driving cars, crashes that would not have happened if a human driver had been in control. People will die in tragic and, unfortunately, high-profile ways as the early examples of deaths and injuries involving self-driving vehicles will become media flashpoints. Lawsuits will unfold and people will be fearful at such an inflection point in technology and its impact on the seemingly ordinary, everyday activity of driving.

At the same time, I have no doubt that statistics will eventually show self-driving cars will be significantly safer than vehicles driven by human beings. They probably already are, even though the technology is still relatively young.

That would be cold comfort to the family of a loved one who dies in an accident involving a self-driving vehicle, however. It will be easy for that family to ask whether the death would have happened if self-driving cars were not a thing. How will we react collectively as a society when these deaths and injuries begin to occur even if, on par, self-driving vehicles are far safer?

We’ve already had a glimpse. In 2018, a self-driving test vehicle operated by Uber struck and killed a pedestrian while testing in Arizona, becoming the first widely publicized pedestrian death involving a fully autonomous vehicle. The accident created headlines around the world, prompted investigations, and caused many companies to slow or suspend their plans for self-driving vehicles. Every future autonomous crash in the short to intermediate term will likely receive similar attention. Tens of thousands of people die each year because of human drivers, and most of those stories never become national news. A single fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle and all of the technology and AI therein, however, will likely dominate the news cycle. Our emotional response to these tragedies will not necessarily include a nuanced understanding of statistical risk.

What Comes Next

If self-driving technology reaches its full potential, it will change the way we drive, and also impact all sorts of things in the economy. Think, for example, of how many jobs involve driving. There are the obvious examples of truck drivers, bus drivers, delivery drivers, and taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers. Those occupations could be almost entirely obsolete in 15-20 years, and maybe sooner. This will have vast impacts on the labor market. I suppose it is also possible that robotic drivers will also bring some costs down as the expense of moving people and things around will become less over time as the technology continues to improve and the costs are amortized out over many years.

But the trend towards driverless cars is also part of a related trend in auto manufacturing in general, which is that vehicles are increasingly not just brakes, axles, and engines, but have essentially become computers on wheels. The most valuable part of a car traditionally has been the engine, but it is becoming the AI found within the vehicle that makes driving decisions in real time.

Aspects of these changes will be decidedly positive. How does the insurance market change if the software is responsible for these driving decisions, for example, rather than human drivers? Maybe car insurance will cost less (although as I wrote about in October 2024, a lot of the new technology in cars is making auto insurance cost more and not less). Maybe it is possible that the elderly and people with disabilities will enjoy enhanced mobility and independence thanks to driverless cars. Maybe there will be significant positive environmental impacts as people care less about the robustness of the engine, and care more about the technology (many of these early self-driving vehicles are either entirely electric or hybrids).

But there will be other social changes, too, that may be more mixed, or not good or bad per se, just different. Some of these changes will be psychological. For over one hundred years, driving has represented freedom. Getting your driver’s license was a rite of passage into adulthood. Someday soon, however, driver’s licenses may barely exist as the majority of vehicle rides will be facilitated by automated technology rather than a human being who is licensed to drive.

History has a way of replacing activities we love with technologies that are, objectively, more efficient. Most of us no longer saddle a horse to travel across town, even if horseback riding remains enjoyable (to some…I never much cared for it). We no longer develop photographs in darkrooms or unfold paper road maps before every trip (unless you’re my dad). We adapted because the new technology solved real problems. My guess is that driving will eventually join that list.

We’ll probably miss it a little. Some of us may even insist on keeping a steering wheel for weekend drives on quiet country roads or the one-off road trip. But if autonomous vehicles ultimately save tens of thousands of lives every year while giving us back billions of hours otherwise spent behind the wheel, future generations may look back at manual driving the same way we look back at typewriters or rotary telephones: with a sense of nostalgia, appreciation, and just a little disbelief that we ever did it any other way.

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Ben Sprague lives and works in Bangor, Maine as a Senior V.P./Commercial Lending Officer for Damariscotta-based First National Bank. He previously worked as an investment advisor and graduated from Harvard University in 2006. Ben can be reached at ben.sprague@thefirst.com or bsprague1@gmail.com. Thoughts and opinions here do not represent First National Bank.