Self-Driving Cars Will Likely Put an End to Driving Cars Yourself (People Suck, Cars Suck, Phones Suck, and Self-Driving Cars Suck, Too!)
C. F. van Niekerk:
– 18 June 2025 –
C. F. van Niekerk:
For all the revolutionary changes that the 20th century inflicted upon humanity, nothing else changed daily life more for the average liberated peasant than the personal automobile. At least that’s the case in the United States.
For over 80 years, nothing else could define the American—from his status in life to where he lived, where he worked, and where he spent his free time, from his personal freedom and lack thereof even down to his lousy diet and lack of normal exercise—than the affordable (with easy monthly payments anyway), personal (too often personalized) automobile.
The only invention that could maybe compete with the oh-so-hallowed personal car is the oh-so-enchanting personal television, but even the mind-altering influence of television, great as it is, can’t compete with the everyday ability to hop into a duck-cluttered Jeep and drive twenty miles one way (in style) for beer and bologna without even thinking about it.
For decades in America, the “freedom” of the open road represented the rite-of-passage to adulthood for the youth, and a put-out-to-pasture for oldsters as they surrendered their keys to patronizing child matrons.
But this is all changing. Like everything else in the present times, the culture is pivoting away from individual autonomy towards something else, something always more brainless, centralized, and nanny-like. Something that really sucks!
Via ZeroHedge, Via The Epoch Times (“Your New Life Of Driverless Cars”, Jeffrey Tucker, 11 June 2025):
If you live in Northern California, you know this already. In a few years, driverless cars will be everywhere. You will likely use them if you travel to the city. If you live in a town of any substantial size, you or someone you know will likely use them.
The numbers on the increase where they are currently permitted are simply amazing. In less than a year, the Google company called Waymo has increased its weekly ride volume from 10,000 in August 2023 to more than 250,000 today. It has passed 10 million successful trips. These cars are everywhere on the streets of San Francisco. They are coming to many other cities including Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C..
There is competition with Uber and Tesla for the same.
Those who have taken them report relief from painful conversations with drivers and safety concerns that come with eccentrics behind the wheel. You can get work done and have conversations without distraction with a super-safe AI driver that gets you where you need to be without tailgating, risk-taking, or missed turns.
That this is our future seems absolutely certain to me. And the core reason is precisely the one that has long vexed this technology: safety.
[. . .]
We were handed the keys to two-ton piles of steel on wheels to every comer after a short test, taken one time in a lifetime. We invite anyone to enter onto giant slabs of hardened tar and do whatever they want with only painted lines as guides. And these people accelerate as fast as they can get away with, and otherwise follow whatever rules they want, with the only enforcement mechanism being a police car that randomly appears to check on things.
The mystery is not that there are 6.1 million automobile crashes in the United States every year. The mystery is why there are not 61 million or more! That the roads are as safe as they are is a tribute to self-interest and the magic of self-organizing systems. Somehow people have managed to work it out and not be in a constant state of panic!
[. . .]
All of this happened without much political objection or controversy, which seems utterly amazing in retrospect. Not even the partisans of free enterprise or libertarianism blinked an eye about a central plan that would have made Mussolini blush.
The United States had led the world in passenger trains for a century. Suddenly no one even cared about those old things. Countless thousands of small towns with beautiful train stations—now turned into breweries or antique shops or left to decay—were completely wrecked. The suburb was born along with the franchise businesses that serve them.
The whole system was pitched as a way to make our lives more convenient but the opposite happened. We moved further away from work and cities, and our commutes got ever longer. The family homestead was no more. Vast swaths of our lives became consumed by auto debt, repairs, vast stretches of tar and concrete that could stretch to the moon and back 10 times, and popup communities with cookie-cutter houses and brand-name businesses.
The project utterly changed the country. Many communities never recovered. [. . .]
[. . .]
In any case, you are likely as worried about the safety side of this as I am. Remarkably, this is how autonomous driving figures into the mix. There have long been safety concerns. Those have been solved so much that it is indisputably true that they are vastly safer than cars operated by humans.
If you think about it, the driverless car is nothing but a little train made just for us. It is going forward but it is also going back, away from the randomness of human volition and toward a machine that is on an established path that thus removes the exigencies of human misjudgment.
Hardly anyone considers a deeper truth. Maybe we made a mistake in 1957. Maybe we should never have abandoned the passenger train system that we already had in place. Maybe all those highway deaths were unnecessary and maybe the creation of the suburbs as well was too much.
I spend many hours on the road every week. There was a time when I loved to drive, but now I pretty much hate it.
People Suck
For one thing, other people truly suck, and nowhere do they suck more truly than on the roadways!
Yeah, okay, people probably suck worse online. But the reason people suck online is the same reason people suck on the roads: both the internet and the roads give people the illusion of quasi-anonymous personal bubbles, happily insulated from the consequences of their self-absorbed behavior.
An old lady runs her mouth on Twitter/X about Orange Face wanting to consign her back to the horrors of the kitchen. There ought to be a Juneteenth for women, she says! Then thirty other trolls whom she will never meet tell her to go feed her cats, and one tells her to cook her cats, and herself, on a cookie sheet in her oven. And make him a sandwich!
An old lady with Kamala stickers on her bumper drives her Prius ten mph below the speed limit in the left lane, and thirty cars she’ll never see again honk and flip her the bird, while one swerves in front of her and slams on the brakes to cut her off. Then he flings his half-eaten Blimpie sandwich at her before speeding away.
Both old ladies think they can move through life in a personal bubble, and are half oblivious of their annoying actions. And both sets of randos swipe at her before speeding on.
Anonymity or high velocity bring out the thoughtless worst in people.
Drivers Suck, and Driving Makes Life Suck
Anyway, as I was saying, drivers suck. Anonymous, selfish dipshits, all trying to get from one place to another in their vastly different ways.
A lot of us can’t help but think of it as a race. Some drivers race against others. Some race against the clock. Some race just to race. And some are not only not racing, they want to make sure that nobody else can race either. And some are just drunk.
So when a whole country was filled with these imbeciles flying across ever-expanding roads, they had to hire whole battalions of cops to sort of keep everyone in line. Of course, police being police, they have to lord it over people, and local budgets need filling, and they have to justify their existence anyway, so we found ourselves, more or less, living in a police state, where they have check-points to make sure your seat belt is on.
And when enough bourgey people bought car insurance, they got laws passed to make insurance mandatory, and the cops had one more thing to write up tickets for.
On top of the police state, thanks to racial integration and social disintegration, people scrambled for “good schools” and “nice neighborhoods” at the price of morning commutes, and the flurry to the edges of the cities, or to the countryside, to get away from all the “crime,” began. This continues to this day, always another suburb growing like a tumor one more exit down the highway.
And, oh, how the people love their cars! For seven years of easy monthly payments, just about anyone can afford to drive a Mercedes crossover! And then trade it in before the payments are done. The cars have cameras all over them, with built-in navigation, and software updates, all integrated with people’s phones so they can text and talk hands-free, and get alerts when they drift to the edges of the road. And black-boxes over the engines that only dealers can open, and subscription plans for auto-start and heated seats. People just adore their precious cars, but they own them less and less.
And then came the self-driving cars.
Devolving Zoo Beasts Suck
Today’s people are devolving in three main ways.
The first is that they increasingly prefer to live through their phones, and they prefer everything in the real world to function like it does online, connected to their phones, and easy to the point of mindlessness like their phones. Phones, phones, phones.
Second, they increasingly don’t know how to work. They want to express themselves and gain status, but they don’t want to do hard, boring things that don’t directly contribute to that self-expression and status. They are special people, with rights, and special people with rights should get paid when they put in their time and check all the boxes, even if the results lay gasping like always-needy nursing home patients in their piss-sodden beds. They like to live in houses, but they don’t like to build them or work on them, and they wouldn’t know how to do those things anyway.
Third, they increasingly don’t care about autonomy or freedom. Or, more accurately, their definitions of autonomy and freedom are very different from previous ideas of those things. People today don’t mind paying subscriptions to run things that they already own, or paying rent for things that they can simply use or occupy. They care little about privacy or self-sufficiency. And they certainly don’t enjoy the hassles of responsibility. Freedom and autonomy, for people like this, mean freedom to express themselves and autonomy to live lives (increasingly online) right now rather than sacrificing and toiling for later. Who wants to get tangled up in pointless responsibilities? Work-life balance, right?!
Today’s people are like neutered zoo animals.
Self-Driving Zoo Cages Suck
So, back to the car thing. To sum up so far, cars make people suck worse than we normally do; and cars make everyday life suck more than it normally would. And now phones make people and everyday life suck even worse than that!
So the solution to both sets of problems is the self-driving car. Which will make everything suck even worse than the first two!
In self-driving-car-utopia, people can still live way out in the suburbs, and if they want to, they can still kind of own the car. Or at least rent it. But if they don’t want to own one, the robotaxi will be available in some form or another. The nice thing is that folks won’t have to deal with the creepy and usually foreign Uber driver anymore, or the creep delivering packages and GrubHub. And one way or another, they don’t have to worry about wasting all that time away from their phones by having to pay attention to the boring, IRL road. And if every vehicle is self-driving, then there will be significantly fewer accidents and deaths. People are de-evolving, and their abilities to drive are de-evolving right along with them. Self driving cars are the perfect market solution for all kinds of modern decay, right?
Most people will say so.
Never mind that car insurance for those who still wish to drive will become absurdly expensive, if people are still allowed to drive at all. Who can afford the liability if they crash into someone with only their own inferior meat skills?
And never mind the fact that a centralized system can fail, locking people in halted cars, blocking the roadways for miles. Or hacked, causing all the cars across a region to crash together all at once. That would never happen, right?
And if for whatever reason the system doesn’t want you to drive, then you’re grounded until they say you can come out. But they would never do that? Driving is our right, right?
Just like zoo animals happily live in cages under the watchful eyes of their keepers, forgetting how to actually live, the people of tomorrow will happily keep trading true liberty and autonomy, and natural life, for fantasy, status, safety, and convenience.
(Did I say “people of tomorrow?” Every bit of this is true about the people of today! Right now!)
Everybody just wants to be a pet.
And everybody sucks.