The end of driving culture

Ask someone about their travels, and one of the first topics they’ll remark on is how the people, wherever they were visiting, drove their cars. There are New York drivers, aggressive, impatient, and honky. There are California drivers, well adapted to freeway-coasting bumper-to-bumper congestion. In Florida they drive fast; in Maine they drive slow. This is by no means limited to the United States. In Cairo, a city whose streets operate almost entirely without signals, drivers have learned to operate in a collaborative, if grating, cacophony—there, beeping is just another way of talking. In Jakarta, Indonesia, part of the morning road commute involves decelerating, in the middle of traffic circles, to hand tips to traffic conductors who keep everything moving. What, then, will come of these tics in the age of the autonomous vehicle? If we’re to take self-driving car companies seriously, the human driver, and the way humans drive, stands to be automated away. Indeed, for our car culture, the end of the road is one where software rules it. Waymo, arguably the leading AV company, has become famous for its robotaxis, primarily the white electric Jaguars with spinning Lidar sensors. F…