What happens when every car drives itself?

I’ve been trying to imagine a world where every car drives itself. Not the transition period (which is what we’re in now). The end state. 100% autonomous. No human drivers on public roads.

The thought experiment is harder than it sounds because the second-order effects are enormous. Every part of how cities, economies, and daily life are organized changes when you remove the human driver.

What we gain

Safety: About 40,000 people die in traffic accidents in the US every year. The NHTSA estimates that 94% of serious crashes involve human error. Remove human error, and you remove most of those deaths. That’s roughly 38,000 lives saved per year. Every year.

That number alone is almost enough to end the argument. 38,000 people. Every year. Not dying.

Space: RAND Corporation research suggests that autonomous vehicles could reduce the need for parking by 60-80%. Cars can drop you off and go park themselves (or just keep driving, picking up the next passenger). Downtown parking garages become apartments. Parking lots become parks. The ~30% of urban land currently dedicated to parking gets repurposed.

Time: The average American spends 54 minutes a day driving. In a fully autonomous world, that’s reading time, or working time, or sleeping time. Multiply 54 minutes by 230 million licensed drivers and you get an astounding number of reclaimed human hours.

Access: People who can’t drive (elderly, disabled, young, visually impaired) get full mobility. A 14-year-old can go to soccer practice. An 85-year-old can go to the doctor. The car doesn’t care who’s in the back seat.

Traffic flow: A network of autonomous vehicles can coordinate. No traffic lights needed. Cars negotiate intersections in real time, meshing through gaps like synchronized swimmers. Waymo is already testing coordinated behavior with multiple vehicles.

What we lose

Driving as freedom: There’s a feeling, especially for Americans, that driving is independence. The open road. The wind. Your hands on the wheel, going wherever you want. I’ve felt it. Driving through empty desert at sunset with music playing. It’s a specific kind of freedom that’s hard to replace.

Driving as ritual: Learning to drive. Getting your license. Your first road trip. Teaching your kid. These are rites of passage. Moments of connection. I wrote a short story about a man watching his father’s parking lot get demolished. The resonance was in the memory, not the concrete.

Control: Sitting in a car you can’t steer is an act of trust. Not everyone can make that leap. Not everyone should have to. Some people genuinely need the sense of agency that comes from being in control of the vehicle.

The edge cases: What does a self-driving car do when it has to choose between two bad options? The trolley problem isn’t academic when it’s encoded in software. The IIHS and Tesla both have data on edge cases. Neither has solved the ethical framework.

Where I land

I keep going back and forth.

38,000 lives a year is not a number I can argue with. That’s a small city worth of people, every year, killed by a transportation system that we accept because it’s normal.

But the loss of driving as a human experience, as freedom, as connection, is real too. Not comparable to death, obviously. But real.

I think the end state is obvious. Autonomous vehicles are safer, more efficient, and more accessible. The numbers are overwhelming. The transition will happen. Not in 5 years. Maybe in 25. Maybe 40. But it’ll happen because the math is too good to resist.

And when it’s over, when the last human driver pulls off the road, something will be lost. Something that was dangerous and inefficient and wonderful. Like fire in a house. We replaced it with central heating and it was the right call. But sometimes you miss the fire.

I miss the fire already, and it hasn’t gone out yet.

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