I was watching TV with my eldest daughter, Lisa, when she commented on the program: “I don’t think that will work for me.” The news item was about self-driving cars and the technology that enables them. She told me a frightening story of vigilance and caution that made me think of some scary driving times in my life. I could have used “crash avoidance,” and “blind spot monitoring,” as well as “brake assist.” And so could one of my friends.
My friend is a spectacularly careless driver; I have no idea how many accidents she has had or caused, but my presence in the passenger seat of a car she is driving is a severe test of our long friendship. I have warned her away from mashing pedestrians, have heard screeching tires when she enters a city street and watched her glide dreamily through bright red lights. She handles all of these cardiac-inducing moments with a humor that implies that I am unnecessarily overwrought. A recent visit by a mutual friend and her guest brought home the stark reality of the horror show that is her driving. Our mutual friend asked me, “How long has she been driving on the left side of the road?”
My daughter told me of an incident when my grandson was new and mewling and she was driving to or from somewhere with him in the rear-facing car seat, in the back seat of her car. “I was still trying to get a handle on the whole parenting thing and I was terrified that I could not see my baby in the back seat and then — I was in a construction zone.” Orange cones blocked off the right lane and signs — augmented with flashing lights — warned of reduced speed limits. “Brake lights went on in front of me, and I slowed down, trying not to look into the back seat to check on my baby. And I’m checking the rear-view mirror to see who is coming up behind me.”
In Elia Kazan’s 1969 movie, “The Arrangement,” a depressed executive, played by Kirk Douglas, intentionally drives his little sports car under the trailer of a big-rig truck. “Lane alert,” and “brake assist” might have prevented him from doing so, had the technology existed at the time. But that technology was still not a feature of the car my daughter was driving twelve years ago, when she noticed that a driver behind her was not slowing in the construction zone. “It was just one lane, and the right lane was rubble and dirt and construction trucks and stuff,” she told me. The car was getting bigger in her rear view mirror and the cars in front of her were still slowing. “I was in a controlled panic and when that car got closer, I had to do something.” In a move reminiscent of Douglas’, Lisa wrenched the wheel of her car to the right and plunged into the construction-clogged lane. “The driver didn’t even brake,” Lisa said, “and plowed right into the car that had been in front of me.”
My friend’s driving would be a challenge to any “smart” car technology and would have her car stopping, veering and stalling from the cloud of dangers she regularly drives through. But the car holding my daughter and grandson needed no more technology than the ability to handle, with alacrity, her decision to plunge into danger, and out of the way of death. Which is why she is reluctant to embrace the idea of self-driving cars: some decisions should not be delegated. “No thanks,” she said. “I’ll drive.”