San Francisco and Phoenix have become petri dishes for the driverless revolution. If you’ve wandered their streets recently, you’ve probably seen a Waymo or Cruise vehicle gliding by, empty of human life but full of quiet, algorithmic intent. The machines are here, and they’re multiplying.
This week, WIRED’s Aarian Marshall joins us to dissect the state of self-driving cars, the regulatory red tape struggling to keep up, and the strange new world where human drivers could become a relic of the past. Will robotaxis make cities safer—or just weirder?
The Self-Driving Arms Race
The biggest tech companies are locked in a battle to flood streets with autonomous vehicles, each one racing to be the first to declare humans obsolete behind the wheel. Waymo, backed by Google’s deep pockets, is already operating a robotaxi service in Phoenix and parts of San Francisco. Cruise, the GM-backed rival, has been aggressively expanding—sometimes with, let’s say, “mixed results.”
Self-driving cars were supposed to herald a utopia of zero accidents and perfectly efficient traffic flow. Instead, they’ve been getting confused by construction cones, halting in the middle of intersections, and occasionally blocking emergency vehicles. Turns out, reality is messier than the carefully controlled simulations.
The Safety Debate
Proponents argue that robotaxis will eventually be safer than human drivers—no drunk driving, no road rage, no texting at 70 mph. The numbers mostly agree: autonomous vehicles crash far less often than human-driven ones, at least when operating in well-mapped, predictable environments.
But when they do fail, they fail spectacularly. There’s something uniquely unsettling about a car that freezes in the middle of a busy street with no one inside to move it. And when things go really wrong—like Cruise’s infamous incident where a pedestrian was dragged—public trust in the machines takes a nosedive.
The Human Cost of an Autonomous Future
If self-driving cars take over, millions of jobs will vanish. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers—entire industries built around human-operated vehicles could crumble. The ripple effects won’t stop there.
What happens when we no longer learn how to drive? Will future generations look at a steering wheel the way we look at a rotary phone—something vaguely familiar, but functionally useless? And what do we lose when we stop making split-second, instinctual decisions on the road?
Driving isn’t just a skill; it’s a cultural touchstone. Road trips, late-night drives to clear your head, teaching a teenager how to parallel park—these experiences may soon be artifacts of a bygone era.
The Final Boss: New York City
If self-driving cars can dominate a city of straight roads and predictable traffic patterns, what happens when they step into true chaos? New York City, with its aggressive cabbies, jaywalking pedestrians, and delivery cyclists who seem bound by no known laws of physics, remains the final boss of autonomous driving.
So far, no company has dared unleash driverless cars on the city’s streets. And maybe that’s for the best. A self-driving car trying to navigate Manhattan at rush hour is the closest thing we’ll get to watching an AI have an existential crisis in real time.
The Future Is Driverless—Ready or Not
Like it or not, the machines are coming. Regulators are scrambling to keep up, public trust is shaky, and tech companies are determined to push forward anyway. The only question left is whether society will adapt—or simply surrender the wheel to the algorithms and hope for the best.
Did You Know?
- Waymo’s self-driving cars have been known to cluster together in eerie, inexplicable deadlocks, as if plotting something.
- Some autonomous vehicles are programmed to honk at humans who get too close—because what’s progress without a little passive-aggressive beeping?
- In 2018, a Tesla on autopilot mistook a fire truck for empty road and crashed directly into it. Even AI has blind spots.
