Are you a good driver?

**PJ Vogt** (0:26)
Before we start the story today, I wanna ask you to imagine a different version of your life. You're you, but it's almost 200 years ago. And unfortunately, in our hypothetical, it's Monday morning. It's Monday morning, and it's very early, pre-dawn. You wake up to this really hard wrapping at your window. That's the knocker upper, here to get you up for work. We're in the 1800s, before the invention of the adjustable alarm clock. The knocker upper is a job. The knocker upper walks the neighborhood with a long stick and taps it on the windows of people's houses early in the morning to wake them up for work. Who wakes up the knocker upper for work? Nobody knows. But this is a job. A job that will actually exist for another century. Outside, the gas street lamps are still burning. The lamp lighter lit them the night before. He's supposed to come at dawn to extinguish them, but it's so early that he hasn't yet. Your lamp lighter is one of those neighbors you have a deep fondness for, a fixture. Every day, you watch him make the rounds at dusk with his ladder and his light. You yourself are a driver. Professional driver, 200 years ago, is also a job. You're a person who sits on a coach and holds the reins of a horse. You take passengers where they want to go. You start your work day.
Okay, hypothetical over. Two of those jobs are obviously so long disappeared that most people don't know about them. The knocker upper is your iPhone alarm. The lamp lighter is the electric street light. The third one, driver, has persisted. As a job for some, as a routine human task for nearly everyone else. This is a story about whether that's about to change. It's about how the word driver, which right now makes me picture a human, could soon transform to refer to a machine. The same way the words dishwasher, printer and computer all did. I've thought about this maybe too much in the year I've been working on this story. In conversations constantly, I'd ask the humans I met the same question. Are you a good driver? Are you, do you consider yourself a good driver?

**Alex Davies** (2:42)
I do within limits. I think I'm a good driver because I understand the limitations of my driving.

**PJ Vogt** (2:51)
This is Alex Davies. He wrote an excellent book called Driven, The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. Alex, like me, thinks a lot about human driving, about his own personal limitations. What are the limitations?

**Alex Davies** (3:04)
The limitations are that I can't always pay attention to everything, that I get tired. I've been trying really hard to be calmer in the road. My husband and I are expecting our first baby this fall.

**PJ Vogt** (3:19)
Congratulations.

**Alex Davies** (3:20)
Thank you. And I thought that along with reading all the baby books, a good project to work on is just be calmer in the car.

**PJ Vogt** (3:28)
A very good resolution because, of course, for most of us, driving is the riskiest behavior we routinely engage in. In fact, even Alex, despite his good intentions, would actually get in a car accident just a few months after we first spoke. He was okay. It was the car that was totaled. Safety is the entire pitch for the driverless car, which is really a car driven by a computer. Driverless cars don't get drunk, tired, or distracted. They never text or feel road rage. And these driverless cars, they aren't the future. They're actually already here. But it's funny, if you just don't happen to live in a place that already has them, it's easy to not see how fast things are changing. Robo taxis, like Waymo, are operating in 10 American cities, providing millions of rides to Americans. In China, the rollout is happening even more widely. They're in twice as many cities. But here, if you live in a place like San Francisco or Austin, today a driverless car is about as exotic as an Uber. A passenger in those cities opens up their phone and decides who should drive them. A human driver or a robot driver. How that happened is a story, a story we are living through right now, whose ending promises to totally reshape the places we live. And today, we're going to tell you how we got here in chapters.
Chapter one, dreams without drivers. So it turns out this dream that inventors have had to replace the human driver with some kind of machine, that dream is about as old as the lamplighters.

**Alex Davies** (5:05)
People have been thinking about a self-driving car for just about as long as there's been a human driven car.