Losing a Street Fight to Elon Musk
The New York Times has recently (and laudably) focused some attention on safety decisions made by the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla. A Monday story focused on the company’s “Autopilot” autonomous driving feature, which is, bluntly, not very good. Despite this, Elon Musk regularly over-promises about the feature’s capabilities, and essentially allows Tesla owners to beta test it on public streets. Autopilot is not very good in part because of design and engineering decisions made by Tesla’s CEO. Specifically, Musk—against the advice of many of his engineers—decided his company’s cars would handle autonomous driving solely with cameras, and without radar or other sensors commonly used by Tesla’s competitors in the space.
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Throughout these stories, safety experts and engineers seem a little baffled as to why, exactly, Tesla would do such flagrantly dangerous things. As the head of the National Transportation Safety Board tells the Times: “We’re trying to warn the public and tell Tesla, ‘Hey, you need to put some safeguards in.’ But they haven’t.”
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Given what we now know about the limits of automated driving, why might a car manufacturer continue to overhype its capabilities, introduce it to urban roads that it's particularly unsuited for, and intentionally remove safeguards against its well-documented limitations? They may want the fully automated driving future to come into existence even with the full knowledge that the technology doesn’t work. If you were a renegade automaker who is both aware of the actual history of American urban transportation and something of a sociopath, the fact that autonomous driving is clearly unsafe might actually present an opportunity.
A car manufacturer could make a bet that by intentionally making his vehicles more dangerous, particularly to people outside of them, regulators and states and municipalities will respond not by punishing his massively over-valued company but instead by attempting to further limit opportunities for Teslas to come into contact with non-drivers. That is, by walling off the streets, giving more space to cars, and making all roads more freeway-like. A true believer might come to think that causing more mayhem will only accelerate the speed with which this transformation takes place. One reason to make that bet is because it is essentially what happened with automobiles themselves.
If you asked the typical American to picture city streets prior to the mass popularization of private automobile use, they might think of them as basically the same but with horses and carriages instead of cars. In fact, as historian Peter D. Norton explains in his book Fighting Traffic, at the beginning of the 20th century the American city street was understood to be a public place shared by pedestrians, electrified streetcars, and other pre-automobile modes of transportation. “Motorists who ventured into city streets in the first quarter of the twentieth century were expected to conform to the street as it was,” he writes. A place, in other words, where children played in the streets and people walked wherever they chose.
Because of the unique dangers the car posed to others, especially pedestrians and children, it was originally treated as an outside invader and a menace. Newspapers covered each pedestrian death as a scandal. Then, as people began contemplating actual concrete ways to restrict automobile usage in cities, the auto industry and its allies quickly organized a massive counter-campaign. They invented, and cities quickly criminalized, “jaywalking.” In a few short years, industry definitively won out over the safety of children and everyone else. “The car had already cleaned up its once bloody reputation in cities,” Norton writes, “less by killing fewer people than by enlisting others to share in the responsibility for the carnage.” What happened next? “Engineers said they could rebuild cities to accommodate cars, and they were already breaking ground.”
The street and the city were transformed, the freedoms of everyone else curtailed and their health endangered, for the sake of a valuable and growing American industry. If you know that history, might you think it could repeat itself? And then might you start thinking of ways to hasten that process?
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Alex Pareene
December 10, 2021
