What if we're the last generation to drive?

My niece is ten. She lives in Austin. She’s never ridden in a self-driving car, but she’s seen Waymo vehicles on YouTube and she thinks they’re “normal.” Not exciting. Not scary. Normal.

When I was ten, I couldn’t wait to drive. The promise of a driver’s license at sixteen felt like the key to the universe. Freedom, independence, adulthood, all compressed into a laminated card. I practiced for months. Failed the parallel parking portion. Passed on the second try. That license was the most important document I’d ever held.

My niece might never need one.

The math

Waymo operates in four cities as of early 2024. Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin. Tesla FSD is available to all customers in North America and improves with every software update. Aurora is running autonomous trucks on Texas highways.

My niece turns sixteen in 2030. That’s six years of compounding progress. If Waymo doubles its city count every two years (which is roughly the current pace), it’ll be in 16+ cities by then. If Tesla FSD reaches true Level 4 autonomy by 2028 (ambitious but not impossible), every Tesla on the road becomes a self-driving car via software update.

By 2030, a sixteen-year-old in a major American city might not need to drive anywhere. The car comes to you. You sit in it. It takes you where you’re going.

Why would you learn?

The horseback riding analogy

People still ride horses. It’s a hobby. A sport. An expensive weekend activity. Nobody commutes on horseback. Nobody hauls groceries on a horse. The practical need evaporated and the activity became recreational.

Driving is heading there. Not tomorrow. Not in five years. But within my niece’s lifetime, I think driving a car on public roads will be an activity you choose to do, not something you need to do. Track days. Country roads. Weekend drives with the top down.

The freedom I associated with driving was really the freedom of mobility. The car was just the mechanism. If a robot can provide the mobility without requiring my attention, the freedom doesn’t go away. It changes shape. You get the mobility plus two free hands plus the option to sleep or read or stare out the window.

More freedom, technically.

So why does it make me sad?

What we lose

I think about learning to drive. The clutch of my dad’s old stick-shift. The stalling at intersections. The first time I merged onto a highway and felt the speed as something I was responsible for. The concentration. The alertness. The way driving demanded all of you in a way that few other daily activities did.

There was something in that. In being the one in control. In navigating a machine through space using your hands and eyes and judgment. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t safe. But it was human in a way I can’t fully explain.

My niece won’t have that. She’ll have something better, safer, freer. But she won’t have that specific feeling of sitting behind a wheel for the first time and thinking: I’m moving. I’m in control. I could go anywhere.

She’ll have: I’m moving. I could go anywhere. The second part is the same. The missing piece is the “I’m in control.” And I’m not sure she’ll miss what she never had.

But I’ll miss it for her, a little.

The timeline

This isn’t prediction. I’ve been wrong about timelines before. But the direction feels clear. NHTSA data shows autonomous vehicles are already statistically safer than human drivers. Insurance companies are starting to price that in. Younger people in cities are already skipping car ownership. The economics, the technology, and the culture are all pointing the same way.

The question isn’t if. The question is whether my niece will think of driving the way I think of driving, or the way I think of horseback riding.

I hope she gets to choose. I hope driving stays available as an option. A thing you do because you want to, not because you have to. The best timeline is one where the robots handle the commute and the humans keep the mountain roads.

But even in that best case, the experience of learning to drive, of needing to drive, of that being the threshold of independence, that’s going. Maybe already gone.

We might be the last ones who remember what it felt like.

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