I have some bad news: You are almost certainly a worse driver than you think you are.

Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry. And, worst of all, they drive impaired far more often than they should. Even when we’re firing on all cylinders, our Stone Age-adapted brains are often no match for the speed and complexity of high-speed driving. There’s as much as a 2.5-second lag between what we perceive and how fast we can react in a vehicle traveling 60 mph, which means a car will travel the equivalent of two basketball court lengths before its driver can even hit the brake.

The result of this very human fallibility is blood on the streets. Nearly 1.2 million people die in road crashes globally each year, enough to fill nine jumbo jets each day. Here in the US, the government estimates there were 39,345 traffic fatalities in 2024, which adds up to a bus’s worth of people perishing every 12 hours.

The good news is there are much, much better drivers coming online, and they have everything human drivers don’t: They don’t need sleep. They don’t get angry. They don’t get drunk. And their........

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