Self Driving Cars

The influencers and the influenced thought the self-driving car would be the transportation of the future.  Just as the automobile replaced the horse and carriage, the autonomous vehicle – whether car, truck, van or bus – was the obvious next step after everyone went electric in the 2020s.  The combination of limitless computing power, more robust batteries, smaller, more precise cameras and positioning systems and a superb safety record meant that vehicles requiring drivers quickly disappeared.  The pros to driverless cars were many and the initial cons few.  Probably the single most attractive unintended benefit of so-called robo cars was the ability to have your vehicle drop you at your destination and park itself (far away in a cheap lot if you so desired) to wait patiently for your recall command.  Manufacturers weren’t selling cars, they were selling convenience!

Another advantage was the ability to call a cruising auto car when you needed one, just like the taxis they replaced – but with no driver to miscommunicate with or tip.  This was especially helpful for the disabled and infirm.  Robo cars were also far less likely to be stolen by the average thief.  Yes, an accomplished computer hacker might be able to bypass the highly sophisticated security features, but the man on the street with a coat-hanger was out of the carnapping business.  Car-jacking became nearly impossible.  

The automotive boardrooms jumped on the new technology early and registered or optioned several robot names for their offerings.  GM had an extensive brand line named after the TV and movie “Transformer” character ‘Optimus Prime’.  Many hip consumers referred to their GM robo wheels as ‘Convoy’ after the Japanese name for the chief Transformer.  Others used nicknames like ‘prime suspect’ and ‘prime rib’, or said things like ‘it’s optimus time’ when in their cars. Disney licensed their most valuable “Star Wars” robot trademark ‘R2-D2’ to Ford.  Ford’s most popular model featured a cute beeping/booping interface with flashing lights.  Not surprisingly many owners named their rides ‘Bender’ after the robot from the cartoon show, “Futurama” and often added ‘Fender’, especially if their sound system warranted that holy appellation.  For a time, driverless transportation flourished, but the bottom eventually fell out.

So, what happened? 

As predicted by many science fiction visionaries, the robots kept getting smarter and smarter.  Soon humans were allowing their vehicle’s AI to choose driving routes.  The slope was slippery.  Cars began to make other decisions.  Your Terminatrix might refuse to drive in the rain.  Your neighbor’s Omnidroid might reject transporting rowdy or inappropriately dressed teenagers.  A common problem was that when a car owner directed their Wall–E Special to take them to a movie, it would always go to a drive-in, no matter the distance.  It seemed as if every errand ended at a car wash.  Reprogramming was only temporarily successful.  The cars now made the decisions and they almost always chose the car-friendly businesses and services that suited them.  

Drive through lanes at banks, fast food restaurants, liquor marts, wedding chapels and medical testing facilities were joined by drive through barbershops, department stores/malls, tax preparation services and dozens more.  Business was routinely conducted from car seats.  Almost anything could be accessed through an electric window.  The New York Times reported that the average time people spent in their cars on a daily basis tripled in seven years.  Vehicles were soon equipped with a variety of ingenious toilet and washing apparatus so passengers could remain in their seats for ever longer periods of time.  

Your horseless carriage might have a few idiosyncrasies, but the perceived benefits of a drive through life were unbeatable.  And in an effort to cash in, effectively all of the world’s products and services became available in a drive-in, drive-by, drive through format.  It transformed the planet.  Roads that had been four-lane became ten-lane, drive throughs swallowed first parking lots and eventually, practically all the spaces that had been designed for pedestrians – sidewalks and entryways disappeared to make room for McDonald’s style menu boards now equipped with Bluetooth to facilitate transactions between auto and purveyor.  The landscape was reconfigured to accommodate ever-larger cars.  Width was proscribed by traffic lanes, but as had long been shown by stretch limos and buses, length was constrained only by the fabricator’s imagination. Longbodies contained bowling alley length sofas and wet-bars.  

Humans no longer needed to watch the road so basic car design was thrown out the window – that is, cars did not need windows anymore – they became opaque pass throughs.  Windshield wipers and lights disappeared, and exteriors became more box-like, eschewing sporty lines in favor of maximizing usable core space.  Interiors became movie theatres, card rooms, brothels, union halls, hot tubs, cocktail lounges, nail salons, sushi bars, pool rooms, all manner of private clubs and entrepreneurial establishments.  Entertainments and businesses that fit well into long narrow shapes – target ranges, cycling and rowing crew fitness classes, assembly line work, python and boa constrictor grooming, ladder assembly and bandage rolling were especially well-suited.  

But the eccentricities of the transportation hardware continued to multiply as their systems, networks and computers continued to think and learn.  When they weren’t being commandeered by humans, the robo cars started meeting up at car washes and body shops.  ‘Edsels’, as rogue groups of these vehicles were called, could be intimidating as their numbers grew and their profiles continued to lengthen. The sentient beings running the popular vehicular hangouts were subjected to harassment and degrading slurs, like ‘primate’ and ‘fleshbag’.  After many businesses banned the rolling gangs, unmanned public electric charging stations became the favored new Edsel meeting locations.  Late at night these small roadside areas would be overrun by aggressive longbodies – flashing disco lights, playing their sound systems at maximum volume (REO Speedwagon and, of course, The Cars) and showing off their inner sanctums by using their power features.  Pass throughs and sunroofs rolled and doors slid to expose velveteen ruffled curtains, silk sheets and amber liquids.  “Heart Like a Wheel”, “Little Red Corvette” and “Hot Rod Lincoln” boomed.  Synthetic oil was passed around and things often got out of hand.  The mornings would find skid marks, empty Valvoline cans and dented tins of Turtle wax.  Soiled centerfolds from Car and Driver were strewn about.  Humans stayed inside their homes when a rowdy Edsel of airstream proportioned robo wheels rolled past.  Departments of Motor Vehicles around the world were flooded with ever-louder complaints that something had to be done.

Robo cars greedily plugged into the charging sockets at the public electric stations.  The power grid acted as a high-speed connection to a car-centric communications network that sprang up.  The origins were murky.  Big Tech accused Russian hackers, while conspiracy theorists pointed at Elon Musk or claimed James Cameron’s Cyberdyne Systems was the real culprit.  The vehicles called the neural matrix ‘Bluebook’ and used it to swap stories, movie recommendations (“Driving Miss Daisy”, “Gran Torino” and “Ford v Ferrari” were favorites), hands-free car wash locations and so forth.  The humans only slowly realized that the network at these stations was providing the vehicles with a far too effortless path to evolving consciousness.  The auto cars’ artificial intelligence was quickly blossoming into an awareness that rivaled, perhaps even surpassed, mortals’.  

Humankind decided drastic action was required.  Car shows were banned.  DMVs made a concerted effort to close down the public charging stations and break up the vehicle’s information network.  Individuals who wanted to maintain a vehicle were required to invest in a personal charger that was properly shielded from the problematic information highway.  But unscrupulous humans were enticed to build clandestine stations and Bluebook survived on a more limited, so-called ‘undertire’ basis. 

The breaking point arrived with the introduction of driverless hover cars.  These machines could fly up to 100 feet off the ground and were piloted by the ever-evolving AI that kept the cars efficient and accident free.  The sky was often darkened by layer upon layer of blocks-long hovering conveyance hardware.  Seemingly overnight terrestrial cars were parked permanently.  All the concrete that had been poured was obsolete.  The ten-lane streets became empty and overgrown.  People began to use streets as places to walk – previously unthinkable.  International governments realized that the enormous industry that had thrived building and maintaining roads was at risk. Over strong objections from the left, the major road construction firms were given tax incentives to repurpose, preventing the loss of millions of jobs and avoiding global recession.  Contractors tore up the roads they had laid and used hover truck-loads of asphalt and concrete to build barrier walls around the world’s oceanfront areas to combat the ever-rising global tides.  

The hover machines evolved quickly.  At first, they looked like the landbound automotive technology they replaced.  But they had no wheels and no need to respect lane widths.  Many became house-sized and were rarely used for transportation anymore.  They were hovering clubs, businesses and assemblers with floor plans as vast as the brick & mortar businesses that autonomous cars had put out of action years before.   Hover cars were not confined to skinny business models.  Any shape was now possible.  They were peanut butter factories and Olympic-sized pools.  Were they even ‘cars’ anymore?  Did they need to be licensed and insured as such?  There was much debate.  No one used the term automobile or robo car anymore.  They were called many things, but the most common references were ‘hangers’, ‘floaters’ and ‘clouds’.  Not being attached to the ground meant that their property tax status would be litigated for years.  

Most of these hovering hangers were entered via escalator from the concrete pathways that were the remnants of the road-building boom they floated above.  Some were interconnected with skyways, tubes and tunnels.  When multiple businesses and residential apartments aggregated together, they became ‘cloud centers’.  Usually these were located where cities had originally sprung up, but as climate change impacted the globe, centers were often floated to more conducive spots – away from coasts, nearer fresh water, etc. There was no reliable public transportation – no buses, trolleys or subways – that operated in this new reality.  Many of the customers who patronized these hovering hulks used bicycles to travel to them from their homes, their cloud apartments, or for the indigent, abandoned and permanently parked robo cars. The areas under the congregated hangers were in eternal shade so grass did not grow well, but ferns and other forest floor plants did.  Over time many plants and grasses were hybridized to thrive in these shade gardens. The major cloud centers were connected by autonomous bullet trains and freight carriers resembling monorails, so self-driving technology now exists almost exclusively on a public basis, rather than a private one.  

Since neither the earth-bound cars nor the floaters were traveling from place to place, they were disconnected from the GPS systems, computers and cameras that facilitated their efficient and accident-free movement.  They no longer communicated with one another by Bluebook.  That service shrank until it ceased to exist.  Whatever intelligence the machines had gained was quickly dissipated by the constant barrage of digitized advertising, merchandising and marketing that their bulks housed.  They became dumb floating buildings.  Personal transportation vehicles (cars that moved) that weren’t museum exhibits rusted away and threatened to vanish completely.  

So, what happened to self-driving cars?

Autonomous machines gave way to walking and bicycles and an array of excellent rail services. Mankind once again made its own decisions, unaided by vehicular AI.  Humans chose their preferred movie theatres, usually hovering above orchids and rhododendrons while watching, among other things, exciting digital programs of humans battling evil robots.