Who domesticated whom? The weird and changing symbiotic relationship between humans and the phylum collisionem autocineti (cars)

Alien explorers arriving on Earth would likely ignore the people and go and ask the nearest automobile, truck, or bus to take them to their leader. After all, the biggest and most active things in population centers that look like life (usually defined by movement, numbers, reproducibility, and energy usage) are, well, road vehicles.
Let’s have an alien biologist’s look at whether we humans are there to support vehicles or whether vehicles are there to support us. We may well find that the “Transformers” franchise has it almost right and, as in the movies, there are some changes coming up in the symbiosis between humans and vehicles that have grave ramifications for the mechanical population.
Aliens would be well within their rights to think that us little organic things are working to support our larger vehicular masters.
Habitats for Vehicles and Their Humans
Roughly 40%, perhaps more, of a typical American city is dedicated to streets, parking lots, gas stations, and the other needs of vehicles. If we (or our hypothetical alien) measured our cities’ priorities based upon land usage, transportation would rank higher than health, education, fun, industry, or housing for humans.

For those who say that pedestrians and bicycles take up too much space in urban areas, it turns out that 80% or more of the real estate for mobility is dedicated to cars; the rest is shared by trains, pedestrians, bicycles, skateboarders, etc. Vehicles are the biggest moving priorities for virtually all cities. This is true even in the famed City of Portland, Oregon and nearly as much in the “bike-friendly” cities and surrounding communities of Amsterdam, Berlin, and Copenhagen. There are reports that downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota has given vehicles more than 60% of its land to vehicles, while Los Angeles is famed as being the “land of the automobile.”
Compared with how much humans pay for living space, vehicles get a great deal for their real estate.
While humans in tony areas of many cities pay $600–900 per square foot to purchase housing, we usually charge nothing for the street parking. Renters in expensive Los Angeles routinely pay $2,000/monthly for a two bedroom apartment while their vehicles are charged nothing or perhaps $60/monthly for a private parking space. Even the folks complaining about the very high parking fees in Manhattan pay less for the sleeping, er, parking space for their vehicle than they do for their own bedroom.
Many communities, Los Angeles included, require homeowners to provide sleeping arrangements for their vehicles. Single-family homes are required to have two covered parking spaces, for example, and the space dedicated to the driveway and garage is often equal to or larger than the footprint of the house where the humans sleep.
How We Spend Our Lives
There are roughly 1.1bn automobiles in the world today. The habitats for vehicles are expanding across the world as vehicles increasingly find homes in previously inhospitable regions such as China, Africa, and India. The life expectancy and survival rate of vehicles worldwide are slowly going up with an average age today of about 11 years.

Regardless of where vehicles live their lives, most of them have the advantage of living lives of relative leisure. While humans spend about a third of their lives asleep, the vehicles spend about 95% of their lives asleep parked in their spaces. The duty cycle for a private vehicle is only around 34 minutes per day.
Put another way, as you’re reading this, your car is likely doing nothing; it spends most of every day asleep in its parking space.
The issue of unemployed vehicles is an invisible, well, highly visible scourge of communities. Undeterred by loitering laws, vast armies of cars simply hang out on the streets doing nothing useful at all.
When moving, vehicles are rarely pushed to do much at all. Despite having an average top speed of around 120 miles/hour, the actual speed of vehicles in cities is only around 16.5 miles/hour. The exotic species of vehicles such as Teslas and sports cars are rarely asked to use their acceleration muscles as there are rarely any habitats where they can.
These vehicles don’t to carry much, either. About 61% of the roughly 1.2m vehicles driving around Portland are occupied by one person. In Los Angeles the rate is more like 74%.

By comparison, though, humans are far more active in supporting their vehicles. Around 80% of American households, second only to the Italians, “own” a car. Per capita, the individual humans spend $6,000 yearly to possess, insure, feed, and service their own private car. With a per capita income in the US of $58,030, this means that humans are dedicating 10.3% of their work efforts to their cars.
Assuming an 8-hour workday, the ratio of daily human life supporting their cars and the percent of daily car life spent supporting their humans is roughly equal.
Humans and cars have an unusually equal symbiotic relationship.
Population Growth
There is no question that people have been good to cars .The vehicle population across the world exploded once the relationship was firmly established in the 1920s. By comparison, humans haven’t benefited as much in terms of population growth.
In fact, vehicles prey on humans in great numbers. Vehicles today are the single greatest cause of serious injury and death outside of illness and infection to humans. Forget the lions and tigers; it is the car that kills more people than any other large organism.
More than 40,000 people in the US were killed last year by cars. By comparison, about 95 people were killed by all of the other types of animals.
A Near Extinction-Level Event?
All of the above said, we’re on the cusp of seeing dramatic changes in populations of humans and vehicles due, at least in part, between the symbiosis between them.
As a core part of the symbiotic relationship between cars and humans, the people are very involved in the reproductive cycle of vehicles. In much the same way that viruses can exert genetic change in corn through the insertion of DNA and RNA into the corn’s living cells, humans closely direct the genetic lineages of vehicles.
The population growth of cars is in danger of dramatically slowing as humans work to give cars brains.
It is likely that over the next decade we will see the emergence of cars with much more capable brains than the examples today. Self-driving, even autonomous vehicles, are being developed in the labs. This will have profound effects on the number of cars and their lives.
Today’s cars live short, dumb, and happy lives. As noted above, they sleep a lot and don’t work very hard. They emit a lot of gaseous fumes. By contrast, people spend a lot of money and effort to keep cars and the humans often pay for their cars with their lives.

Self-driving cars, though, will get to kill far fewer people. In much the same way that Isaac Asimov described in his robot series, the basic rules of self-driving are built on cars not running over the biologic organisms around them. This won’t have much of an effect on the human population growth, but it will do quite a bit to reduce emergency health care bills and insurance fees.
In addition, self-driving cars will be asked to do more. In the same way that increasingly educated humans are asked to take on increasingly skilled jobs, we will expect cars with brains to do more. No more sleeping around! Autonomous vehicles can expect to do more driving as they move from journey to journey. We have a proxy with today’s transportation network companies (TNCs) in which humans and their cars give 90 other people rides monthly in the Los Angeles region.
Cars will be expected to provide ever-increasing levels of service to their humans and not just increasing pride in expensive ownership.
At the same time there will be less need for as many cars. One self-driving car can support numerous humans, thereby putting our common symbiotic relationship on a much different footing.

The conflict between cars and people is also going to change with people limiting the reproduction of cars and the number of cars killing people coming to an end. We will likely see a dramatic reduction in the car population with perhaps as many as 90% of the cars dying out within our lifetimes. Further, the cars remaining on the planet will have much harder lives.
A question for us all to consider is what do we do with all of the car bodies that will be piling up? There will likely be more than a billion mechanical deaths over the coming decades. What will happen to these vehicles? Recycling may not make much sense as the living car population is smaller than the dead one.

There is an argument to keeping the car bodies around. We may want continue dedicating the same amount of real estate to vehicle grave sites. After all, the value of the human-occupied land in cities is likely to be a source of much controversy as the glut of formerly vehicle-occupied land comes on to the market.
It remains likely, though, that aliens arriving on Earth will still look at cars, especially the smarter ones, as being the dominant life form. We may yet have to consider how to persuade the aliens otherwise.
