Google’s Eric Schmidt is right, “self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime.” But they should not be called cars, they should be called trains. Or high-speed rail pods or something, if the word “train” still conjures up images of Rockefellers and dusty commuter lines.Yesterday, when Schmidt made that statement, he was announcing some progress on Google’s much-ballyhooed effort to create self-driving cars. They’re a ways off from mass production, and state laws prohibiting driverless vehicles remain an obstacle (Nevada’s the only state where you can let a robot chauffeur you around). And there’s this, according to TechCrunch:The current biggest problem is that it runs at the speed limit and nobody drives at the speed limit,’ Schmidt said. Apparently Google has proto-types that don't run at the speed limit however; as Schmidt revealed that Google had a racecourse in an undisclosed location, where the car would race human-driven cars, and win.While the idea that there exists a mysterious secret arena where stunt drivers go head to head against robo-drivers is certainly a pleasing one, Schmidt is wrong about the car’s shortcomings. The Google car’s biggest problem isn’t that people don’t really want to drive the speed limit, it’s that people don’t really want self-driving cars. There is little more foundational to American mythology than the American’s relationship to his automobile. That romantic idea that the car equals freedom and that we can go wherever we want whenever we want and get the hell out of town if shit goes sour.No, there’s been a small error in Google’s calculus here — people love reading about self-driving cars, because it depicts the futuristic world that they believe Google is helping to deliver us. But will anyone shell out extra cash to get a car that drives itself? Yes, in Silicon Valley. They’ll park them next to their Tesla Roadsters. Yet once the novelty of the concept expires, so, probably, will demand for the vehicle itself. And this isn’t just a consumer issue; getting driverless cars road-ready means lobbying for brand new laws, which means wading through bureaucratic muck in 49 more states or the morass of Congress itself. It means selling the public and lawmakers on the idea that Google should drive your cars, not you. And I don’t see that happening for quite some time — even if the cars themselves and the technology that powers them are actually rather awesome.Which is probably just as well; if you take a step or two back from the breathless hype of the tech world, the whole ambitious endeavor seems a little peculiar. The idea, essentially is to spend untold billions of dollars to replace our fleet of cars with driverless automatons that will make transportation more synchronized and efficient. People will be locked in their car-pods, side by side, traveling to a pre-programmed destination. They will, in effect, be passengers on the most over-complicated and antisocial train system ever built. And, given the resource constraints we’re facing, and the fact that technology is nudging us towards mass transit anyways, we should probably be thinking about how best to skip over the techno-gloss and build really good, effective high speed rail and local mass transit.However, if it does work, if Google can sell the world on its automated driverless cars, well, that will be kind of sad — it’d mean that the only way Americans got behind funding what are essentially elaborate, less-efficient trains was to have technology trick us into it. We’d be sitting in enclosed steel compartments, a few feet away but sectioned off from thousands of our peers, inching along at robotically determined increments, believing we were still preserving that mythical freedom that only the automobile can bring.
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