Why Are We Still Driving?

Confronting the weirdness of a Waymo future.

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

It feels as if we’ve been hearing about self-driving cars for a long time, but now they’re really here. Ferrying people to work and school and nightlife from Los Angeles to Nashville, poised to spread to just about every big city in America.

My guest this week is very optimistic about a future where the cars take over. He writes about self-driving automobiles and transportation policy on his Substack, “Changing Lanes,” and he’s a co-author of a recent book with the stark title “The End of Driving.”

We talked about the potential benefits of this transformation, and as someone who loves the open road, I pressed him on what’s lost — in freedom and mastery — if we don’t have to be in the driver’s seat anymore.

Why Are We Still Driving?

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Ross Douthat: Andrew Miller, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Andrew Miller: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Douthat: I want you to start by giving me a sales pitch for self-driving cars. Explain why people might welcome them. What would be good about a self-driving future?

Miller: So we can approach this from the micro or the macro level. At the macro level, 40,000 Americans die every year in road incidents, and that is only those who die. It excludes those who suffer life-altering injuries. None of those need to happen. And the vast mass majority of those are caused by driver error.

So at scale, the more automated driving there is, the safer the roads are, the safer Americans are, the safer anyone who uses the roads are. But at a micro level — not just safety — driving is an immense consumer of people’s attention. They have to give, or they should give, their full attention to the road.

Douthat: In theory, yes. That’s the goal. That’s the ambition.

Miller: If they don’t, we get more of those road incidents that I was describing. But what it allows you to do is it unlocks vast reservoirs of attention. Hundreds of millions of hours every year that Americans would get back for other things.

And as a good liberal, I don’t prescribe a vision of the good life, whether they want to play Candy Crush or whether they want to read The New York Times. There’s any number of things that they could do, but they can’t right now because they must pay attention to the road. It will be a huge liberation of time and attention, which can lead to so many good things.

Douthat: When would you expect, on the current trajectory, self-driving cars, automated driving to become a normal part of life in lots and lots of North American cities?

Miller: I like to — it’s not so much a joke, it’s a wry observation, that around this time last year, I could name every city that Waymo was operating in from memory because there were so few.

Sometime late last summer that stopped being true. I believe they have announced plans to be in more than 15 cities. Their footprint in each of those cities is small, but they’re going to grow quickly. So it really depends on how fast Waymo can scale and how fast their two big competitors, Zoox and Tesla, can scale.

I’m always wary of making predictions because this field is so rife with hucksters and charlatans who make predictions. But if I ——

Douthat: It’s an occupational hazard of podcasting, though, so a general prediction.

Miller: 10 years is a good anchoring thing, 2035.

Douthat: By 2035, then, the normal North American city will have a large fleet of self-driving taxis? Most likely, they’ll be mostly taxis in this scenario?

Douthat: OK. Why is this accelerating and taking off now? We’ve been hearing about self-driving cars for as long as I’ve been an adult. Is it connected just directly to the A.I. revolution? What’s the big push at this moment?

Miller: It is partially connected to the A.I. revolution.

The A.I. revolution is making some of the problems that were associated with iterating the technology easier to solve. But Google’s been working on this since the first decade of the century. The reason that Google’s been working on it and others have been working on it, the reason that Elon Musk thinks self-driving is the future, is because rather than generative A.I., teaching a car how to drive is very expensive initially. But once you know how to do it, it is very cheap to copy.

And then because it is a shared vehicle as opposed to a privately owned vehicle, a robotaxi can be used for as many hours of the day as you can keep it clean and charged. Then, it can just spit out money for you endlessly, every hour, every day, every week. So, from a business point of view, it’s a wonderful business to be in if you can spend enough money to get to the point where you have a safe and reliable product.

Douthat: How much of an obstacle is serious bad weather to this kind of technology right now?

Miller: One way to look at it is if humans can drive in bad weather, a machine can. The question of how they do it depends on which technology stack you’re thinking of. The Waymo approach relies on the consensus of the field that for a self-driving car to “know” where it is, it has to rely on a variety of senses.

So you, Ross, you can see, but you can also smell, you can also taste. The Waymo view is that a self-driving car should be able to see with its cameras, it should see with its radar, it should see with its lidar.

Lidar: Think of it like radar, but it’s light. It shoots out lasers and then it measures how long it takes to get the measurement back. So it can know with great fidelity where everything is in space around the vehicle to tens of meters.

So if you have a car that’s got all of these modes, then rain might occlude a sensor, snow might confuse the lidar, but the radar works. So the more sensing modes you have, the more expensive your car is, the harder it is to scale up your operations because every car costs so much, but the more reliable it is in a variety of conditions.

Tesla is making a big bet that you don’t need any of that. Tesla thinks you can do it all with cameras, and if they’re right, that gives them a huge advantage because cameras are very, very cheap.

So Tesla, once they start rolling out their cybercab, they will be able to produce vehicles in vast amounts and reach scale very quickly. But it’s not clear that that approach is as safe because it doesn’t have the same sensors, and it’s not clear that they have got the same skill of programming behind them that Waymo does.

So it’s very much an open contest between these two — which is going to win?

Douthat: So the limiting factor on Tesla potentially right now is safety, and the limiting factor on Waymo is cost. And then the presumption is that, essentially, in the same way that Uber lost tons and tons of money for an extended period of time, that was OK because everyone assumed they would make money eventually.

This is the same kind of arc, right?

Miller: Yeah. It took Waymo a big investment to get this far, but they are so far ahead and they’ve got such a great record. They’re going to be very difficult to catch. I wish Tesla all the best during this contest. I think they’re going to need it.

Douthat: So you’ve got the mid 2030s as a zone where it’s as normal to hail a self-driving car in an American city as it is to hail an Uber right now. At what point does this become part of people’s transportation reality outside cities? Whether as a kind of suburban phenomenon the way Uber is right now, or is there a self-driving future in the near term for rural America?

Miller: The rural case is easy to answer: no. Just like Uber isn’t a big thing in rural America now.

My take is that the American suburb is actually a good bet for robotaxis. If you can get robotaxis cheap enough, there’s enough demand in the suburbs to make it work. Particularly because of the way that we’ve designed the North American suburbs since Levittown. It is really hard to retrofit those for public transit, whereas with robotaxis, it is entirely possible that the suburbs get them but your local suburb pays some sort of stipend to a robotaxi company to offset the cost of doing business and that makes the economics profitable.

So I can absolutely see this being something that would work in the American suburbs, but it may require us to put aside 20th century ideas of what a public transit agency is.

Douthat: In that scenario, people in the suburbs are using them for commuting? Is there car-pooling? What does the culture of self-driving car use look like in that scenario?

Miller: Well, now you get into an interesting question because there’s two schools of thought.

There is the transport planning professionals school, and then there’s everybody else’s school, or the average American school. The transport planning professional says roads are fixed, finite spaces, there’s only so many cars that can fit on them. This is an asset we have to use efficiently, therefore, we should have shared vehicles.

Just like we get 20 people on a bus, we should have multiple people in every robotaxi or shuttle bus. You’ll get more use and everyone will have more efficient trips.

And then the average American says: Go pound sand. I like being alone. I like my privacy. I don’t want to share my space with strangers. I’m going to be in a robotaxi alone, and if you won’t let me do that, then I will buy my own car and it can drive me around.

So the question is how we thread that needle between planning a future of efficient use and the overwhelming revealed preference.

Douthat: In this extremely hypothetical and contingent timeline, when is it normal for people to have their own self-driving car available for purchase? It’s not part of a taxi fleet. You’re just like, I’m going to buy a car, and of course it’s going to be a self-driving car because why wouldn’t I want that capacity?

Miller: The trick there is liability.

Tesla’s going all in on complete self-driving, but the conventional automakers — your VWs and your Fords, and particularly your GMs — they would love for you to have driving assist that gets more and more sophisticated every year. The steering wheel never goes away, but it can handle more and more of your daily driving in 10 or 12 years. If we solve the liability issue, it can be doing your driving almost all the time.

There’s no reason a privately owned vehicle, if you’re willing to pay for it, can’t have all of these sensor systems to make it work. If Waymo leads the charge and makes lidar rigs incredibly cheap, everyone’s going to pile on that.

Douthat: What level of self-driving is available in Teslas right now?

Miller: So I drive a Tesla personally. You hear a lot about these levels — Level 3, Level 4, Level 5.

I think that sort of language is misleading. All you need to understand about self-driving is: Does it require a human to be actively monitoring the situation or does it not?

Douthat: Right. You get in the back seat and it goes.

Miller: But if I turn on autopilot in my privately owned Tesla, I need to be keeping my foot on the brake and my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road at all times.

The car can handle most situations, but some it can’t, and it’s my responsibility to intervene in those cases. At the most sophisticated level of a Tesla, you can plug in your destination and it will take you to the road. It’ll take you at the speed limit, or more than the speed limit if you tell it to, it’ll keep you in the center of the lane. It’ll make turns, it’ll stop. It’ll even change lanes for you.

Douthat: And when you say you have to keep your hands and feet active while it’s doing all this, what are you doing with them? Are you just hovering over the brake and the steering wheel until a large bison stampedes across the road?

Miller: Exactly. You don’t have to do anything, but as they said on “The Simpsons” once, “maintain yourself in a state of catlike readiness” in case something happens. There was a time when I was using my autopilot, I was traveling in a part of my town I didn’t know very well, and it wanted to take me down a private road, which was sealed off by a chain hung........

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