I have seen future—but don't know if it works

In August 2016 Ford Motor Company president Mark Fields announced that his company would have autonomous cars, with no steering wheels or pedals, available for ride-sharing services by 2021.  “We believe in our plan that taking the driver out of the loop is really important,” said Fields. Ford is just one of many companies, both inside and outside the auto industry, working on self-driving cars.  But Ford’s announcement is especially interesting because of the pivotal place the company’s most famous product, the Model T, occupies in transportation history. Over a century ago the Model T made driving both possible and popular for large numbers of people.

It may be hard for contemporary audiences to grasp that when the Model T first appeared, a huge part of its attraction was the very act of driving. Cars didn’t just move people from one place to another; they gave people the opportunity to control a powerful, modern machine.

Today the Model T’s twenty horsepower seems pitiful, not powerful.  We can buy lawn tractors with more power.  But to the farmers who made up Henry Ford’s original target market, the term horsepower conjured up images of real horses.   Driving twenty horses was something only a few elite teamsters ever experienced.  Controlling this much power was very seductive. One early auto enthusiast drew an explicit comparison between mechanical and muscle horsepower: “To take control of this materialized energy, to draw the reins over this monster with its steel muscles and fiery heart—there is something in the idea which appeals to an almost universal sense, the love of power.”

But today many people are disenchanted with driving.  One reason is that familiarity breeds boredom.  We no longer marvel at driving any more than we marvel at talking to friends on a slab of plastic and glass we carry in our pockets. Another reason is that driving has become steadily less engaging.  Driving a car like a Model T is a visceral experience.  You are aware of engine and road noise, wind and weather, the need to be in the right gear, the need to anticipate stops (because the brakes are really bad).  Such cars must be actively driven.  But driving modern cars, with automatic transmissions, climate control systems, audio systems, antilock brakes, cruise control and electronic stability control is more like aiming a compact mobile living room down the highway.  Even at 70 miles per hour, it seems easy and boring.

Then, of course, we have other things to do.  Those slabs of plastic and glass allow us to always be somewhere else, mentally if not physically.  Many people would rather be somewhere else than the driver’s seat.  In fact, the allure of smartphones, coupled with the widespread but dangerous illusion that driving a car is easy, are the causes of an increasing percentage of traffic accidents. And it is safety, perhaps more than the decline in interest in actual driving that may push the adoption of self-driving cars.

Autonomous vehicle advocates claim that self-driving cars will greatly reduce accidents. If that proves to be the case it raises the question of whether governments will continue to allow flawed, easily distracted humans to pilot their own vehicles. Better to turn the task over to robots, focused only on the task at hand. But we should be wary of technological Promised Lands. The recent difficulties with exploding Takata air bags remind us that devices designed to protect us can turn lethal, and that technological glitches can take a long while to manifest themselves.  On the highway of the future, a sensor failure or software bug could transform a swiftly moving caravan of autonomous cars into the sort of swirling, metal rending multi-car crash that NASCAR fans call “the big one.”  

In the meantime I will continue to enjoy driving my six-speed manual transmission “monster with its steel muscles and fiery heart,”—but I won’t turn off the electronic stability control.

Robert Casey is the retired John and Horace Dodge Curator of Transportation at The Henry Ford. He has written widely about technology and industry for academic journals and popular media, and is the author of The Model T: A Centennial History.