Why It’s Time to Let Your Car Do the Driving
Modern driving is paradoxically too complex and too boring for humans
Forget the jetpack. If our space-aged future can be characterized by the self-driving car, then our future is here.
If you don’t pay close attention to the automotive industry you’d be right to wonder “Why is this happening now? Was there some breakthrough in technology that is suddenly allowing cars to drive themselves?”
The simple answer to that question is no. We’ve been heading down this road for quite some time.
It is true that mentions of autonomous cars have been increasing lately, but we’ve been heading down this road since the day Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler rolled the first car out of their Stuttgart workshop 129 years ago.
For most of automotive history, the relationship between car and driver has been one of mastery over (or harmony between) human and machine. But what’s becoming clear is that cars want to drive themselves. From where we stand today, we can see that most of the advancements in the last 100 years have been inching the human out of the driver’s seat, even if that wasn’t their intent. Autonomous cars aren’t the latest offering from carmakers but rather the sum of all the innovations that have come before it. This continual innovation cycle has taken us from horseless carriages to driverless ones.
Autonomous cars aren’t the latest offering from carmakers but rather the sum of all the innovations that have come before it.
Engineers have been imagining self-driving cars for decades but it’s only been in the last few years that the pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place. The breakthrough is not so much any specific technology as much as a catalyzing of disparate elements that have revolutionized what cars can do on their own. Like a big bang in reverse, the disparate pieces have been drifting toward each other for decades and only now are they finally close enough to work together.
Like a big bang in reverse, the disparate pieces have been drifting toward each other for decades and only now are they finally close enough to work together.
Ironically, one of the primary factors that is driving autonomous cars isn’t part of the car at all. Communication technology and all of its associated behaviors, services, and expectations have had as much to do with the rise of autonomous cars as all the sensors, computing power, and related technology that comprise the physical instantiation of autonomy. But the technical know-how has actually been around for years. Meanwhile, the ability to be constantly connected and for the car’s sensors to connect with embedded intelligence has finally crossed the line to be the most interesting part of the in-car experience.
This is how these two threads tie together: the modern car requires the car to do more of the driving than the human could possibly handle. There is so much happening under the hood that it’s simply beyond human capacity to understand or control. In fact, much of today’s driving experience has become a synthetic drive-by-wire experience which is determined by the touch of an eco, sport or sport plus button. Connectivity, on the other hand, enables a much more compelling (and human) set of activities.
Humans are optimizers. We do the things that are maximally interesting and exciting, and driving has stopped being one of those activities. From talking on the phone to social media, connectivity has given us many more interesting things to do than watch a computer drive our car.
HOW WE GOT HERE
It was not always thus. Going for a drive in 1904, for example, was something you had to take pretty seriously. Just look at a typical outfit from the era and you see that driving was more akin to fighting fires than sitting on the couch.
Consider driving the Ford Model T (a task almost ideally suited for the human attention span). Once you got the car running (a 10-step process in itself) there were an equal number of tasks to keep it running. Drivers had to adjust the spark timing, fuel mixture, as well as yank and tug on all variety of levers and pedals to shift gears. Steering required Herculean strength. Drivers had to watch carefully for road hazards or the tires would burst. If you weren’t paying attention to a Model T, it would stop. Driving in 1904 required constant attention and mastery of a variety of skills, both driving and mechanical.
Fast forward 110 years and consider the experience of driving a Tesla. The door handles present themselves and the driver has only to move one lever and step on one pedal to get the car to silently move forward. No more effort is required and none more is desired. “Driving” as we once knew it doesn’t describe the activity of getting a modern car down the road. The irony is that if humans had to monitor and adjust the number of systems under the hood, we couldn’t. There are literally thousands of adjustments happening every second and computational power that far eclipses the Apollo missions. Yet the experience of driving a modern car is mostly yawn-inducing.
The marriage of technology and connectivity are the real progenitors of autonomous cars. With the addition of location awareness and optical sensors, the rate of progress has advanced more rapidly. Through knowing where they are, what to expect when there, and the ability to “see,” cars now are closer than ever to full autonomy. The increasing complexity of the car and the myriad other tasks afforded to the human at the controls create a self-perpetuating cycle. The more the car does, the more we expect it to do. And the more (non-driving) we do while driving, the more the desire to do a broader range of non-driving tasks grows. Each cycle takes the driver further from driving and closer toward the day where cars just drive themselves. Herein lies the cycle in which autonomous cars have essentially created the need for themselves.
It’s ironic (and galling to engineers) that with each technological step forward we get further from the marvel that is the modern car. It’s Zeno’s paradox in reverse. Open the hood of a Tesla and there is only a ‘frunk’: a place to put your groceries. The mechanical underpinnings of that car are invisible. The magic is in the code. It’s the ultimate separation of human from machine. The car has vanished. Despite a new generation of engineering advancements for electric cars (and most modern cars for that matter) they end up being little more than vessels to carry around our phones and connect us to the rest of our lives. As such, we’ve lost touch. And as we’ve lost touch, connectivity has filled the gap.
DEVELOPING CO-DEPENDENCE
Today, cars will keep distance. Keep lanes. Avoid accidents. Alert us when we stop paying attention. Cars decrease our stopping distance. Keep us from skidding. Keep the wheels from spinning. Adjust to put power where there is traction. Safety advancements boggle the mind. We have self-tensioning seatbelts, pre-crash brake preparation, frontal, side, thorax, knee and seat belt airbags. And even when the car does crash it will automatically call 911.
The more cars do, the more we need them to do.
The more cars do, the more we need them to do. Because with each part of driving we give over to the car the more we create an expectation of what the car can (and should) do. The first time anti-lock brakes save us from an accident is the last time we want to be without them. Adaptive cruise control simplifies driving down to steering and after 20 minutes even that feels like an unnecessary burden. Once adaptive cruise is combined with lane-keeping, the driver is little more than a passenger to a technological spectacle. Given how little attention is required to move a car down the road, it makes sense that humans want to do other things.
When cars were new, it took all of our attention and skill to get down the road. Every step we’ve taken since then, every advancement, has made the experience more accessible and as a result, less interesting. The arc of our engagement with driving has gone from conductor to audience to the guy sleeping in the back of the theater. We’ve got other things to do. The car is doing the overwhelming share of the driving already. In the next few years, the focus will be on empowering us to do other things while engineers sort out the final details of full autonomy.
For 50 years we’ve dreamed that cars would one day drive themselves and we’re finally here. Time to slide over and leave the driving to our cars.
Special thanks to IDEO colleagues @DannyStillion, @racheltobias,@pmacdonald62, for help creating this article
