Our familiar car culture would die — and a new one would arise.
SO, WOW, IMAGINE we get there: total autonomy. Manual driving is outlawed. Our cars are better drivers than we ever were. And not only that, they coordinate with one another in an elegant choreography, threading through traffic with inches to spare. Parking becomes parkland, because no cars ever stay still for long; they stop only to recharge themselves as needed. If you choose, you can just hang out at home and let the robocars bring you everything you need. But even if that future does arrive, it would come with a trunkful of nagging questions. What does it feel like to live in that world? And how does 21st-century society — which has been built, in ways large and small, around human drivers — change and reconfigure when they all become mere riders? In the pages that follow, we begin to wonder at some answers.
Read Complete Article