Driving should be illegal

Imagine for a moment that, one day in the future, a major pharmaceutical company released a new miracle drug that radically and instantaneously enhanced human performance. Everyone who took it immediately became significantly faster, stronger, and more efficient. As a result, millions of people began taking it daily. The gains enabled by this drug quickly transformed society—entire industries sprung up to take advantage of the productivity gains it afforded, consumption patterns changed, jobs were created, and a significant portion of the U.S. economy came to depend on its availability.

Now imagine that this drug was discovered to have severe side effects. Namely, it killed people. Lots of people. Some people died directly as a result of taking it, while others died at the hands of people who flew into murderous rages after reacting badly to it. Still others were killed more slowly by poisonous vapor that leaked out of the skin pores of everyone who took the drug. Overall, more than a million people died every year as a direct result of the drug’s availability, and tens of millions more were severely injured.

You can imagine the pandemonium this would cause. Lawmakers would likely convene emergency sessions to ban the drug and would probably try to criminalize its distribution. Boycotts would rage. Protestors would likely take up residence outside the pharmaceutical company’s headquarters. Executives might go to jail. We would all likely agree that, no matter how radically effective the miracle drug was, its human toll made it an unacceptable hazard.

This is, to a first approximation, the situation we currently face with cars. We tend to forget that despite their central place in global transportation and commerce, cars are toxic, inefficient killing machines. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.24 million people die every year in traffic accidents, and between 20 and 50 million more sustain non-fatal injuries. Pollution from cars has covered entire cities in smog, and made the earth immeasurably less habitable. In terms of lives lost, cars are one of the most destructive inventions in human history, rivaled only by gunpowder.

Luckily, there is a solution. Self-driving cars, currently being developed by Google, Mercedes, Tesla, and a handful of other companies, are on their way. Collectively, over the last few years of testing, self-driving cars have navigated millions of miles of roads, and they already appear to be safer and more efficient than human drivers. A self-driving car hasn’t caused an accident. (They have gotten into accidents, but all of those accidents were caused by human error.)

Self-driving cars won’t completely eliminate car pollution, but they will likely be better for the environment than human-powered cars. The cars’ hive mind will help eliminate traffic jams as they can re-route to maximize available roads and be programmed to move at a slow, steady speed rather than the herky-jerky start-and-stops of unpredictable human drivers. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Maryland estimated that self-driving cars could reduce fuel use by 15 percent by using more efficient driving patterns than humans.

The most important thing about self-driving cars is that they are utterly inevitable. They are too superior, too obviously beneficial to humanity, and too technologically feasible not to eventually overtake human-piloted vehicles and become the default standard of transportation all over the world. As Buzzfeed’s Mat Honan put it, “the efficient, unemotional, necessary logic of cars that operate without human error and instability is unquestionable.” Decades from now, our descendants will react in horror when we tell them about car culture. “You mean, you used to drive those things … yourselves?”

Some researchers estimate that, by the middle of this century, self-driving cars could prevent a million traffic deaths a year—making them as important a public health achievement as vaccines. And yet, the road from here to there is long, winding, and filled with potholes.

Self-driving cars will be prohibitively expensive at first. Taxi drivers, long-haul truckers, and other people who will be made obsolete by automated vehicles will rise up to defend the status quo, and traditional auto manufacturers will lobby for protectionist laws to save themselves. Privacy advocates will worry about the tracking of human beings that will be a side effect of the cars’ need for massive data collection. The first glitch in a self-driving car—a hack that renders a car dangerous, a kid who is killed by a car whose software was incorrectly patched—will provoke enormous, sustained populist backlash. The political and regulatory battle over self-driving cars is going to make Uber’s war for survival look like a slap fight.