Baby on Detour

It’s amazing how quickly perceptions can change. It may seem hard to remember now, but in 2017, the hype machine was going full steam ahead on self-driving cars and their presumed future dominance of transportation. Cars would still dominate—many presumed—but drivers would be liberated as software took over their role, making everyone a passenger. The fatal Uber crash hadn’t happened yet. People still believed that Tesla’s Autopilot system was safe and that full self-driving was on the horizon. The reporting on autonomous vehicles suggested they were safer than human drivers, despite a complete lack of evidence. The tech visionaries had spoken and, as is often the case, the media fell in line. But, as 2018 began, criticism began to emerge amid delayed timelines, a growing number of collisions, and the slowing progress in reducing the number of times human test drivers had to take over for computers. As the year played out, critics were proven right — but a much more inspiring vision for the future of transportation has emerged in the wake of the self-driving vehicle.