Schwartz Samuel I - No one at the wheel: driverless cars and the road of the future

I guess I shoulda known

By the way you parked your car sideways

That it wouldnt last

P RINCE , L ITTLE R ED C ORVETTE

I N THE SECOND DECADE AFTER H ENRY F ORDS M ODEL T FIRST rolled off the assembly line, inventors were working to eliminate the weakest link in the chainthe driver. Nearly a century later, that effort is finally coming to fruition. With it could come either better and safer lives or a lifestyle change for the worse. This book explores both futures, as well as the shades of gray between them, and offers a recipe for the best outcome.

At the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, General Motors sponsored a Futurama exhibit called Highways and Horizons. Visitors rode for a third of a mile in audio-equipped chairs through the 35,738-square-foot scale model of an imagined world of 1960, complete with automated highways connecting gleaming cities, sprawling suburbs, vast rural areas, and modern, efficient industrial districts.

This vision must have seemed like a utopian dream to a population emerging from the Great Depression.

In 1960, I was twelve, and people were still driving conventional cars on non-automated highways and roads. On June 19 of that year, a short-lived amusement park billed as the worlds largest opened in the Bronx, two boroughs away from where I lived. My next-door neighbor, a New York City Buildings Department official, gave the Schwartz family two free passes, and my twenty-two-year-old brother Brian took me. Freedomland, spread across 205 acres, boasted eight miles of navigable waterways for river rides, an 8,500-car parking lot, and 37 attractions, including, among other enticements, reenactments of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Great Chicago Fire (gas jets ignited buildings every fifteen minutes and children ran to pump the fire hoses and douse the flames), and a western fort with daily shoot-outs.

One experience stood apart for me: a motor car traveling on a track that prevented riders from swaying and veering off the roada form of todays autopilot. The idea that you could travel without steering a wheel (although I did pretend to steer) seemed more magical and powerful to my twelve-year-old imagination than any of the historical re-creations at the park.

By 1964, driverless cars for the masses were still just an aspiration, but especially after I rode on one of a line of automatic skyway cars at the Worlds Fair in the adjoining borough of Queens that year, the autonomous vehicle (or AV for short) became for me, as well as for many other people, an idea full of potential and promise.

My first car came the closest to being a self-propelled vehicleat least in my mind. It was a used 1960 Chevy Impala I bought for $450 in 1966 from tip money I got delivering groceries by bike from my fathers grocery store in south Brooklyn. It had wings (called fins) like an airplane. Each year all my friends and I would eagerly anticipate the fin changes and enlargements; as they got bigger, the feeling you were flying while driving got stronger. You could even believe you were a little airborne when accelerating on the highway.