Passenger

Google’s first self-driving car looks like someone compressed a cartoon panda until it stopped caring about the world. Small, rounded, faintly baffled—sensors instead of eyes, no steering wheel because that particular problem has been reassigned. You get in. It takes you somewhere. Presumably.

The predictable reaction is suspicion: the same reflex that greeted the railway, the first computers, anything that moved decision-making further from human hands. I understand it but don’t share it. My first genuine thought was about liability. When one of these things eventually hits someone—and statistically, inevitably, at some point something will go wrong—I’m not the one who was holding the wheel. That’s not nothing.

What’s actually interesting about self-driving vehicles isn’t the convenience pitch, which is always the easiest angle to sell. It’s the question of what they do to the experience of being in a car at all. Driving requires just enough attention to prevent you from fully thinking about other things—meditative in the way light manual work is meditative, repetitive and embodied and absorbing without demanding much. Hand that off to a computer and you’re alone with your thoughts for the entire journey. Whether that’s better depends entirely on what’s in your head.

The 2014 Google prototype maxed out at 25 miles per hour and could only operate within specific mapped areas. It was a proof of concept assembled by engineers who didn’t have time to make it look designed, which was probably the right priority. What it did—navigate roads without a human—mattered more than whether it looked good doing it. The absence of a steering wheel was the detail that unsettled people most, which tells you something about how much of our relationship to cars is about the feeling of control rather than its actual exercise.