Nothing could bring our waning love for the automobile more forcefully home than reports that the BBC may be axing its internationally bestselling motoring show, Top Gear. First broadcast in 1977, fronted by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, Top Gear began as a straight-faced motoring magazine show. It became the best-selling juggernaut production of its peak period after a 2002 reboot, fronted by the laddish trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond.

At its peak, Top Gear encapsulated an entire relationship between engineering and the pursuit of excellence: one inextricably bound up in material and cultural conditions that were already wavering when Clarkson was fired. And it’s this complex relationship, equal parts technical and emotional, which is in flux today: not just within the show itself, but out in the car-driving world itself.

The joy of Top Gear, in its Clarkson/Hammond/May salad days, was the way it captured the two dominant forms of motoring enthusiast: the tinkerer, and the petrolhead. Top Gear tinkerer features would depict these three middle-aged men making daft modifications to second-hand cars, for example turning a Porsche 944 into an “ambulance”, or a Ford Transit into a “hovervan”,  then try to complete ever sillier challenges. Petrolhead segments would feature the same three middle-aged men, driving beautiful, fast, staggeringly expensive miracles of engineering perfection through stunning landscapes.

Of course, petrolheads and tinkerers are often one and the same, though in my observation car-lovers tend to incline one way or the other. My late dad, for example, was a tinkerer: an engineer by training, he spent as much time as he could get away with in a workshop overflowing with hand and power tools, plus shelf after shelf of labelled tobacco tins brimming with nuts, bolts and other small objects that might come in handy one day.

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Tinkerers, of course, don’t confine their tinkering to cars. But cars have, historically, been a central object of tinkering attention. Whether mending, restoring, customising, or otherwise fiddling about with engines, the tinkerer is happiest absorbed in the material business of making the damn thing work. This both affords distinctive pleasures, and calls for a particular mindset: one eloquently defended by the mechanic and philosopher Matthew Crawford.

Working with your hands, Crawford argues, requires distinctive modes of knowing based in practice, imitation, and tradition as much as in abstract principles. Importantly, too, such work requires a pragmatic acceptance and understanding of what your chosen material will and won’t accommodate, such as flexibility, flammability, melting-point and so on. The resulting aggregate skill set is both physical and aesthetic: Crawford speaks of “pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation”, a sentiment my dad would indisputably have recognised.

For the petrolhead, meanwhile, the main attraction is how fun it is to make machines go ridiculously fast. Crawford analyses the emotional side of driving as a distinct aspect of his philosophy of engines, arguing that self-directed driving at speed expresses an attitude to risk-taking and personal agency that delivers immense social benefits.

For Crawford, giving up that sense of agency to an infrastructure of automated vehicles, speed cameras, and safety-minded restrictions may deliver some social utility, narrowly understood. But, driving is emotional as well as functional, expressing that aspect of our spirit that takes risks, and aspires to mastery of our tools. At its best, he characterises skilled driving as a “state of grace”.

In peak Top Gear, the avatar of tinkering was James May: an amiable nerd emanating pure essence of garden-shed. Clarkson, on the other hand, embodied the petrolhead delight at what these engines can do. (Hammond was the designated straight man and token biker.) Clarkson obviously knew about as much about engineering as I do, but his transparent delight at howling V8s, smoking brakes, and machines that let you corner at speeds that would kill you in a lesser vehicle, was genuinely infectious to watch even for a motoring agnostic like me.

But in different ways, both the tinkerer and the petrolhead have been losing cultural cachet for some time. Indeed, Top Gear itself captured this decline, mostly depicting tinkering in comic terms, and motoring excellence as the out-of-reach preserve of far-away experts. The supercar segments lionised these sleek, roaring vehicles as things of magic and wonder a long way from the reach of someone in a shed. And while my dad took his own tinkering seriously enough, car modifications for Top Gear challenges are usually comically shonky workmanship done not for the admiration and emulation of tinkering peers, but for banter. In amidst all the motoring was a pessimistic message radically at odds with Britain’s history as a nation of engineers: that fiddling under the bonnet is off-limits to amateurs, except as a joke.

As for the emotional side of driving, petrolhead joy in the high-velocity “state of grace” has also grown problematic. This is partly thanks to mounting anxieties over the financial and environmental price of fossil fuels — and, more broadly, a growing sense of scarcity. But it’s not just climate change. It speaks, too, to a growing discomfort with the pursuit of excellence as such — especially such resoundingly impractical forms of excellence as a car that will do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds but doesn’t have a boot.

Engineering miracles such as the Bugatti Veyron express a culture that will stop at nothing in pursuit of the “state of grace”, attainable in transcendent moments of harmony between driver and machine. And the cultural cachet accorded to this pursuit is, far more broadly, on the wane. It’s hard to point at a single cause, though it’s possible that at least some of those who once pursued mastery of tools and machines now devote the same attention to video gaming. In any case, the tinkering culture that once underpinned such joyfully pointless quests for excellence is also waning. Here, de-industrialisation no doubt plays a part, and it probably doesn’t help that modern gadgets are deliberately built to thwart tinkerers. So, too, are modern cars: there is much less point in buying a Haynes manual for a vehicle whose innards are largely powered by computer software.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the kind of inventive “shopcraft” that once characterised Britain’s tinkerers is today found more in culture where scarcity is part of life, and hence where tinkerers are still valued. Nor should it surprise us if the aspiration to build supercars has migrated with the tinkerers. Earlier this year, Entop unveiled the first Afghan supercar: the Simurgh, which looks like a Batmobile and runs on a modified 2000 Toyota Corolla engine.

The internal combustion engine was, once upon a time, accessible both mechanically and financially. Such machines afforded a democratic and emotionally potent playground for the symbiotic 20th-century emergence of the tinkerer and the petrolhead: the twin mastery of the engine’s innards, and of its capacity for excellence. But with its comical tinkerers and inaccessibly magical supercars, even peak Top Gear tacitly acknowledged that this age was on its way out.

Post-Clarkson the show has limped on for several fairly forgettable series, until presenter Freddie Flintoff’s horrific track accident last year took it off the air – possibly forever. And this may be wise: for even by 2015, the writing was on the wall.

Regulatory changes and rising fuel costs were already combining into the now acutely palpable pressure on Western consumers, to shift from internal combustion toward batteries. Some years on, there are no car manufacturers anywhere (except perhaps in Afghanistan) working on new internal-combustion models, while the cars we already have are at the heart of many energy-related culture wars. Whether it’s the cost of EVs, the politics of “Net Zero”, “15-minute cities”, or the geopolitics of petrol prices, much of our most contested political fractures concern personal transport. Against that backdrop, Top Gear’s fun, relatively apolitical magazine format feels at best out of step, if not outright disingenuous.

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And the energy transition has a bearing on the car as symbol of agency, too. This is partly practical: compared with internal combustion engines, the technical complexity of EVs poses tremendous barriers to entry for car-tinkerers. And there’s a class element, too: hybrids and EVs are prohibitively expensive compared with a battered-but-serviceable petrol runabout.

No wonder, then, that many young people are deciding not to bother, or to treat cars as mere appliances, with as little emotional weight as a dishwasher. To the extent that cars speak of agency or excellence today, they do so in ways that are ever more problematic – or simply inaccessible, whether through complexity or cost.

Cheap, abundant fossil fuels may have placed machine-enhanced grace temporarily in the hands of Everyman; but today, we are witnessing the end of that era. I have too much faith in the world’s nerds to imagine that tinkerers will ever die out completely; but the meaning of cars has already changed forever. And outside the dwindling community of tinkerers, a culture that has largely abandoned the search for mechanical mastery may not even feel this as much of a loss.

Caution is a strange word to use. On the day they released the statement, about 70,000 new cases of Covid were confirmed in the United States, and about 1,000 people died of it. Is it “cautious” to stop using a vaccine which would almost certainly reduce those numbers, because of an uncertain chance that it might have negative effects in a tiny cohort?

But caution, in this sense, has been rife during the pandemic. The governments of various European countries stopped the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over similar concerns. Germany, the Guardian reported in March, “was the first country to refuse to allow people over the age of 65 to have the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the absence of evidence of how well it worked in older people, indicating a more cautious approach than most”. 

Over the last two years, again and again, the fears of some possible risk caused by something we might do have outweighed the fears of a thoroughly real, utterly obvious risk which was killing people at the time. And it has, I think, been a failure of the field, or at least the practice, of bioethics.

Bioethics is the study and application of ethical philosophy as it applies to medical and biological research and practice. As a former philosophy student, I have always found the idea very strange – after years spent arguing over the wildly different implications of minor-seeming differences in ethical frameworks, it was amazing to me that you could corral ethicists into things called “ethical review boards” or “independent ethics committees” which would then give you an answer to the question “so is this ethical or not?”

(“We are pleased to inform you, Herr Doktor Kant, that the board rules that you may lie to the murderer for the purpose of concealing your friend’s whereabouts.”)

Drugs continue to be licenced and trials continue to be carried out, so I suppose not every ethics committee gets bogged down for three thousand years in discussions of what we mean by “the good”. And perhaps in normal times, the system works reasonably well, although you do hear some horror stories.

But during the pandemic, something has gone terribly wrong, and I think that the system of ethical approval in medicine has probably cost tens of thousands of lives, at a conservative estimate.

There’s a tweet from 2018 by a California software engineer, about the ethics of self-driving cars. It goes:

Philosophy: so sometimes it goes haywire & ends up-

Me: do the thing that kills fewer people

Philosophy: but it's very salient th-

Me: do the thing that kills fewer people

Philosophy: but the human element of control is-

Me: do the thing

Me: that kills

Me: fewer people

— Mason (@webdevMason) April 2, 2018

I think about it quite a lot. There are interesting questions, sure: if a self-driving car kills someone, who is responsible, the driver or the manufacturer? If you’re designing a safety system for the self-driving car, should it value the life of the occupants more highly than those of people outside?

But they’re quite niche questions. If, in the future, it turns out that a self-driving car will, on average, kill fewer people than a human-driven car, then it would be the ethical thing to do to get a self-driving car. Even if, every so often, the self-driving car does something really weird, like mistake a cyclist for a road marking, or a lorry for the sky, fewer people will be killed in a world where humans don’t drive and robots do. And that is good, so – all else being equal – we should say that self-driving cars are the ethical choice.

You can construct clever scenarios in which that is not true. But they have to be clever. As a starting point, as a reasonable first draft, “Do the thing that kills fewer people” is hard to beat.

In bioethics, though, we’ve overcomplicated things. For instance, early in the pandemic, people were campaigning for “human challenge trials” into Covid vaccines. In normal vaccine trials, people are given the vaccine (or a placebo or other control), and then the researchers observe how many people get the disease naturally. If it’s significantly fewer in the vaccine group, then we say that the vaccine works.

But it can take months for enough people to catch the disease naturally. When I was on the AstraZeneca trial in summer 2020, prevalence was low – there was real concern that it would take many months to get enough data.

With human challenge trials, participants agree not only to be given the vaccine but also the disease. It lets you use far fewer participants, and get your results far quicker, than a traditional vaccine trial.

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A promising vaccine candidate, the Moderna mRNA vaccine, was ready in a lab in January 2020. The hundred or so doses that would have been required to get very solid evidence of effectiveness could have been made at lab scale in a few days. We could have known by February, or March at the latest, whether the vaccines worked. Yes, we’d still have had to scale up production, and that would have taken months. But the whole process would have started earlier. Instead, Moderna’s vaccine was not given emergency use approval in the US until December.

As the philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell points out, there are obvious-seeming objections to human challenge trials. You have to give people a potentially dangerous disease: what if it kills one of them?

But one plausible estimate is that roughly 18 million people have died of Covid during the pandemic – that’s an average of about 28,000 a day. Bringing the end of the pandemic forward by even a single day could easily save thousands of lives. A small risk to a small number of young, healthy volunteers was hugely outweighed by a very likely large reduction in risk to many thousands of old, vulnerable people.

Philosophy fans might think that this is a classic utilitarianism problem: is it OK to sacrifice one to save many; can I torture the terrorist in order to find the bomb? But as Chappell notes, in fact it is not. There are willing volunteers offering a (small but real) sacrifice for the greater good. It is an act of altruism, or even heroism, not coercion. “In what other context would the default assumption be to ban heroic acts of immense social value?”, asks Chappell.

There have been other failures. Recently, the drug Paxlovid was shown to be highly effective against severe disease. So effective, in fact, that the trial was stopped midway, because it was deemed unethical to give half of the participants a placebo when it was clear the real drug worked.

But the drug is still not approved in the US. So as Zvi Mowshowitz points out, “It is illegal to give this drug to any patients, because it hasn’t been proven safe and effective,” but also, “It is illegal to continue a trial to study the drug, because it has been proven so safe and effective that it isn’t ethical to not give the drug to half the patients.” 

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This is not the only such case. A trial of a drug designed to protect against HIV was stopped last year, because the drug was so effective that it was unethical to give placebo. But the drug was not actually approved by the FDA until … Monday!

There are two important points to make, here. First, while I’m talking about “bioethics”, it’s not clear that it’s actually bioethicists who are the problem. For instance, Peter Singer of Princeton, probably the world’s most famous bioethicist, is on the board of 1DaySooner, the human challenge advocacy group, as is his fellow bioethicist Nir Eyal, of Harvard. Leah Pierson, a Harvard bioethicist who is writing a book about the failings of bioethics during the pandemic, stresses that when the CDC paused the use of the J&J vaccine, lots of the bioethicists she knows were appalled at the decision. But the practice of bioethics as actually carried out in major institutions, such as the FDA and CDC, often leads to these bad decisions. Matt Yglesias makes a good case here that public health agencies tend to follow somewhat rigid rules, rather than the best available science, leading to bad outcomes like a delay in approving fluvoxamine: perhaps I should complain about “institutionalised public health” rather than “bioethics” per se.

Second, as Pierson points out, “When these systems work well you probably don’t hear about it.” No doubt there are lots of drugs that get approved relatively smoothly, and trials which go ahead without much fuss. I don’t know how representative these problems are.

But the problems do exist, and they seem to be exacerbated by the pandemic. Chappell thinks that the main problem is one of status quo bias: that is, that changing things feels like the “risky” option, and keeping things the same feels “safer”. And, he admits, that may (or may not) be true in non-pandemic times. But in the pandemic, the status quo is visibly very dangerous. Throwing some low-but-not-zero-risk options into the mix, like early approval of vaccines or human challenge trials, are almost certainly lower-risk, in terms of the likeliest expected outcomes, than sticking with the status quo. 

There is also an issue that humans instinctively think there’s a difference between bad outcomes caused by our actions, and bad outcomes caused by inaction. It’s hard to make a good philosophical case for this, and what the distinction between an “act” and an “omission” is (Jonathan Bennett had a go), but it’s how we feel. Killing one person by giving them a faulty vaccine feels worse, somehow, than letting a thousand die because we let the vaccines sit in a warehouse for another 24 hours.

And it’s easy to come up with reasons why we need to put more hoops in place for researchers and clinicians to jump through, because the one guy who dies in a botched human challenge trial is very obvious, whereas the thousands of people who would have died if the trial never took place are completely invisible.

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But whatever the reason is that the hoops are in place, they are in place, and people have to jump through them to get things done. It took until December for the UK to decide to vaccinate the under-12s, despite it being well established that schoolchildren were driving the pandemic, because bioethicists could only take into account direct risk to the patient at the time – not the likelihood that prevalence would go up, or whether the children would rather not put their own relatives at risk. And it’s amazing, with hindsight, to read this approving piece from October last year about how a doctor prevented Donald Trump from forcing through early approval of a Covid vaccine.

It’s rare that academic philosophy can have such a direct impact on people’s lives. But how we apply bioethics really can save or kill thousands, just by changing the speed with which we approve drugs. In peacetime, perhaps, it’s OK to argue the toss and act with caution. But in a pandemic, perhaps we really ought to apply the standard of “Do the thing that kills fewer people”.

In the end, what was unveiled was not Marty McFly on a levitating skateboard, but the not-so-soaraway Segway – a two-wheeled electric scooter.

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To be fair, the technology was quite impressive – especially the self-balancing mechanism. However, as a commercial product, it was deemed too expensive, too cumbersome and too nerdy to revolutionise personal transport. Look around you in any town or city and you can see that the critics were right – the Segway did not change our way of life.

However, unlike the infamous Sinclair C5 (another ill-fated personal transport ‘solution’), the product didn’t die. It found niches here and there, and the company found new owners.

An article in The Economist brings the story into the present day:

“It took Segway a decade to hit its initial 13-month target to sell 100,000 units of its original two-wheeler. In 2018, just three years into production, Segway-Ninebot will sell 1m scooters, up from sales of 600,000 last year. Ninebot’s factory in Changzhou builds over 5,000 scooters a day. The firm’s backers, which include Xiaomi, valued it at $1.5bn in its latest funding round.”

The technology has evolved and product lines now include unicycles, ‘e-skates’ and ‘hoverboards’ (which don’t actually hover, but are much less bulky versions of the original Segway concept – i.e. a wheeled, self-balancing platform that you stand and ride around on).

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While it remains to be seen whether the streets will ever fill with people using these devices, there is one of the company’s product lines that I think could prove highly consequential:

“[Gao Lufeng, chief executive of the company] has especially high hopes for delivery businesses. In five years’ time he wants unmanned delivery vehicles called Loomo, currently being trialled by its robotics arm with Meituan-Dianping, an online-services giant, to account for over half of Ninebot’s total revenue. Using artificial intelligence Loomo can wheel goods from the gate of a compound into lifts then up to office doors, and, as costs come down, could take them straight to workers’ desks…”

At the moment, Loomo is a hoverboard with robotic and AI functions. You can ride it, but among other abilities it can follow you around like a little robot dog. Judging by what Gao Lufeng told The Economist, the plan is to develop Loomo into an autonomous transportation unit.

This is a potentially enormous market – and not just within factories, warehouses and offices. Instead of delivery vans lumbering around our streets, imagine unmanned delivery pods bringing us our shopping. Such systems could also function as robotic porters, carrying our luggage for us and generally doing the heavy lifting.

Clearly, there’s investment going into the technology and, in theory, it should be easier to get right than the self-driving car. Automated delivery pods would be smaller and slower, therefore safer. They’d probably use pavements rather than roads – though, like a human pedestrian, they’d have to be able to cross the road safely. Even on the pavement, they’d need to avoid fixed and moving objects – including lampposts, joggers and urinating dogs.

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The biggest challenge is likely to be crime. How would the delivery pods defend themselves and their cargo against theft and vandalism? Electric shocks would be out of the question, but not video surveillance. Equipped with cameras and network connections, the pods could transmit live footage of the crime (and the criminals) to the police.

In merely navigating the streets, they’d be constantly monitoring their surroundings. Therefore they wouldn’t just be delivery pods, they’d be mobile CCTV systems. If they also functioned as help points – and being networked devices with Al capabilities, why not – they’d could effectively serve as mini police officers.

Sooner or later we will find ourselves sharing our streets with robots. Whether we’ll find their presence annoying, creepy or reassuring remains to be seen.

In a world due to be turned upside down by robotics, genetic engineering and quantum computing, we’re going to need more than lawyers and accountants making the big decisions.

In fact, it would be great to have some scientifically-literate decision-making on some not-so-futuristic policy areas too.

Take the example of highway maintenance. Politicians probably get more angry letters about potholes than any other issue – but somehow there’s never enough money for adequate repairs. One reason why is that the taxation of heavier vehicles doesn’t properly reflect the damage that they do to road surfaces.

It might be assumed that the heavier a vehicle the more damage it does – and indeed that’s the case. What isn’t as widely understood is just how disproportionate an impact that each unit of extra weight has – meaning a heavy goods vehicle does massively more damage than a car:

It’s a point explained by Philippa Edmunds in a piece for CityMetric:

“The standard 44 tonne HGV, which is the industry workhorse, causes 136,000 times more damage to road infrastructure than a Ford Focus because the damaging power rises exponentially as weight increases – a phenomenon known as the ‘Generalised Fourth Power Law’.

“Local and urban roads, unlike motorways, are not built to sustain the large volume of heavy goods now traffic using them.”

The Generalised Fourth Power Law, or Fourth Power Rule, means that with every doubling of weight, a vehicle does sixteen times (i.e. 2×2×2×2) as much damage.

There are a few complications to take into account, but that’s the basic physics.

Ms Edmunds represents the UK Campaign for Better Transport, which argues that road freight is significantly undertaxed – and not solely because the damage caused to roads:

“HGVs are almost seven times more likely than cars to be involved in fatal collisions on minor roads. They’re responsible for 17 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and a fifth (21 per cent) of NOx emissions from road transport, despite making up just 5 per cent of vehicle miles. When the full costs of HGVs are taken into account that equates to a £6bn a year taxpayer subsidy.”

As with all hidden subsidies, the distortion of incentives causes further problems:

“This subsidy undermines the incentive for the haulage industry to be efficient. Only a third (34 per cent) of HGVs are full in terms of load volume. Almost another third (30 per cent) are driving around completely empty – a figure that’s been growing for some years. Partially loaded trucks result in unnecessary lorry journeys to feed our shopping habits.

“In contrast, the German distance-based charging system incentivises efficiency and has reduced empty lorries by a third, as well as reducing tonne kilometres because of better loading rates; prior to its introduction, Germany had similar empty lorry levels to the UK.”

Hidden subsidies often have hidden beneficiaries. A prime example, in this case, are the online retailers whose delivery vehicles trundle around minor roads and residential streets in ever-greater numbers.

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If those such as Amazon had to shoulder the full costs of the congestion, pollution and damage done by their deliveries, then price competition would speed up the transition to more sustainable transport technologies.

Electric and self-driving vehicles are the key to change:

• Electric engines would massively cut pollution (including noise pollution)
• With dynamic road charging, delivery vehicles could be incentivised to travel where and when they cause the least congestion
• Without driver error, there’d be fewer accidents
• And without the need for a driver in each vehicle, it would be feasible to have larger fleets of smaller, lighter vehicles – which would do less damage to the roads

Door-to-door deliveries could be entrusted to very-much smaller vehicles such as the delivery ‘pods’ already being tested. These are small enough to share pavement space with pedestrians rather than road space with traffic. We might trip over them, but that’s better than being run over by a truck.

All of this is going to happen sooner or later, but to make it sooner we fast need a rational system of road taxation.

If it weren’t for Alice Spawls’ essay in the London Review of Books, the centenary might have gone, er, unmarked:

“Pedestrian markings appeared later, during World War Two, when the edges of roads were whitened so that people could see them in the blackout. As late as the 1950s many of the markings remained optional – recommendations not rules – and presumably some sort of Brownian motion ensued. Now there are so many markings the roads need constant maintenance and one type of sign has barely faded before a new rule or style supersedes it.”

Road signs have a much longer history:

“Most of our signs are so familiar we don’t think twice about them, and their shapes so standardised we consider them entirely impersonal. But before arrows began to point the way, in the 18th century, hand symbols were used – manicules. North was a fleur-de-lis. The red and white ‘No Entry’ sign is said to be based on the Habsburgs’ heraldic device (like the Austrian flag) and is so old because of the immemorial need to keep people out…”

They too have proliferated in recent decades – the absurd overkill resulting from the mindless application of rules without reference to scale and context.

Then there’s all the other ‘street furniture’, especially the ugly railings designed to corall pedestrians at junctions – and usually bent out of shape by some drunken motorist (and left that way for years as a momento of their fecklessness):

“It can’t be denied that our roads are ugly. The tarmac is poor and patchy, riven with cracks and holes, great craters collapsing. Markings are often crudely painted and blotchy. The old signs are messy, like half-rubbed-out sketches.“

Just occasionally one sees the streetscape as it could be – for instance when a road is freshly resurfaced, but not yet repainted.

It’s only when it’s absent that one can fully understand the visual exhaustion we’ve imposed on the built environment – a mess of fractured symbols, into which the compounding mess of shop signage, parked cars and crap architecture has made its home.

Will we ever be free from it? The good news is that we might be – and soon. Self-driving cars will change our lives in more ways than we think – including the way that our cities look and feel.

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With their array of sensors, automated vehicles won’t need the road signs and markings that human drivers require. With our wandering minds banished from the driving seat, the systems we use to regulate traffic needn’t scream for the attention of distracted eyes and ears.

Therefore the potential exists for a radical decluttering of the streetscape – and a catalyst, perhaps, for a deeper re-humanisation of the urban environment.

On Medium, Phil Levin of the 99mph consultancy applies this framework to the impact of self-driving cars:

“A lot has been written about the ‘first order’ effects of autonomous vehicles (AVs): How they will reduce traffic fatalities, make rides more comfortable, or put truck drivers out of work. But the bigger story here is the ‘second order’ effects — how improvements in mobility will cause us to reexamine fundamental assumptions of how we live.”

The second order effect he’s particularly interested in is the impact of self-driving cars on property prices. Unsurprisingly, prices are highest were property is closest to where people want to be. However, the effect of self-driving cars will be to lessen the tyranny of distance:

“Autonomous vehicles make commutes more pleasant, so people will be willing to live further out: A 40 minute commute in traffic is a different animal if you are watching TV, napping or answering email instead of focused with hands on the wheel…

“…Autonomous vehicles may even shorten commutes: This one is hotly debated, but some believe AVs will reduce travel time by packing roadways with more cars per lane or increasing average speed through vehicle-to-vehicle communication.”

Levin and his team modelled the effect on the property market in and around America’s biggest cities. There will be money to be made:

“We conservatively estimate that ~$1 trillion of residential property value is going to shift across 13 major US cities due to autonomous vehicles.”

The shift, of course, will be from closer in to further out i.e. from city centres to suburbs.

Somewhat controversially, the model assumes that driverless cars will undermine public transport (the availability of which is currently a big plus point for city centres):

“Autonomous vehicles will eat away at public transit: This will be true for even the most convenient transit corridors. Public transit, which already struggles fiscally in most major cities and is starting to lose share to Uber, simply won’t be able to compete with the combination of convenience, comfort and price offered by efficient on-demand autonomous vehicle fleets…Expect a correction for anywhere that ‘public transit proximity’ is baked favorably into property values.”

Levin says one “doesn’t have to like this conclusion for it to be true”. Fair enough, but I’m not sure it needs to be true. Self-driving vehicle technology could actually be a huge boost to public transport – especially buses:

• Firstly, driverless buses and minibuses (and perhaps much smaller vehicles) will have lower costs.
• Secondly, advanced management of traffic flows has the potential to reduce congestion and increase transit speeds and timetable reliability.
• Thirdly, there will be less of a distinction between bus and taxi services, i.e. flexible routing in response to real time data will deploy vehicles to where the demand is.
• Fourthly, with improvements on price, speed, reliability, flexibility and convenience, demand will increase, providing an economic basis for more services.
• Finally, increased demand for all forms of driverless road transport may force the authorities to skew incentives towards vehicles that use up less road-space per passenger i.e. larger vehicles with more seats.

If this more optimistic scenario for public transport does prove true, I think we will still see the shift in property values that Phil Levin forecasts. Using advanced technology to extend the geographical area over which public transport is easily accessible and properly joined-up will make living outside of the city centres more desirable.

When a new subway line opens, the benefit is reflected in local property prices. Some people believe this enhanced land value should be captured for the public good, not left to land owners who contributed nothing to the improvement. If driverless vehicles do make it to the market – and if they are successfully integrated into city transportation networks, then it will be like a new subway line opening in every suburb at once.

That a lot of money will be made is beyond doubt. The only question is who makes it.

There’s almost nothing in today’s world that wasn’t around in my childhood – albeit in a less sophisticated and more expensive form. Getting the internet was a big deal, but beyond the opening of cyberspace, the world isn’t so very different to how it was forty years ago. Certainly, the changes I’ve lived through are much less significant than those my parents or grandparents lived through by the time they got to my current age.

Driverless cars, however, make me feel like the future is finally happening. And, yes, this technology really is just around the corner – in some cities, quite literally.

The prototypes are out on the road and they’re even letting journalists take them for a test drive. For instance here’s David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

“With the car traveling 40 miles an hour on a busy road in the Washington suburbs, I pushed a button to activate the driverless mode and moved my foot away from the brake and accelerator. The car kept its speed. Soon, a traffic light in the distance turned red, and the cars in front of me slowed. For a split second, I prepared to slam on the brake.

“There was no need. The cameras and computers in the Volvo recognized that other cars were slowing and smoothly began applying the brake. My car came to a stop behind the Ford ahead of me. I began laughing, even though no one else was in the car, as my anxiety turned to relief.”

The model that Leonhardt took for a spin, a Volvo S90 sedan, is better described as “semi-driverless” – i.e. for part of the time he drove, at other times he could choose to let the car drive itself.

This, he argues, is how people will overcome their very natural concerns about the technology:

“…researchers at Penn and Chicago also studied the circumstances in which people get comfortable with computer control, and found a theme: When the choice isn’t all or nothing — when people have ‘even a slight amount’ of control — they are more open to automation.

“That’s where driving is headed. The shift will be gradual, not sudden, as Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, told me. Cars will handle many tasks, while a human driver will have override power.”

And yet, as I’ve pointed out before, there will come a time when government will feel compelled to enforce automation. That’s because there are so many lives at stake:

“More than 37,000 Americans died in crashes last year, most from human error.”

One might assume that hugely more media attention will be paid to the few deaths caused by computer error. But I’m not so sure. Imagine a future where cars can either be human-driven or computer-driven at the discretion of the human driver. Assuming that human error is much more frequent than computer error, every death caused by the former will be seen not as an accident, but as a needless act of gross irresponsibility – akin to driving while using a mobile phone or while under the influence.

Governments will come under intense pressure to make human drivers switch to ‘autopilot’ wherever and whenever the technology makes this a viable option. Leonhardt draws a parallel to gun control:

“The death count from cars exceeds that from guns. So if you are outraged by guns and want things to change, you should feel the same about car crashes.”

This is a really interesting comparison. Driving a car may not seem to be in the same category as carrying a gun, but both are fraught with risk – while engendering a paradoxical sense of control (not to mention enjoyment, pride and identity).

Foreigners often view American attitudes to gun ownership with incredulity. They just don’t understand the passion with which the right to bear arms is defended. However, I think that they will understand when their own governments try to stop them from driving.

Charlton Heston once declared that the government would only take his gun from his “cold dead hands”. In the next few decades, there will be those who clutch the steering wheel with equal determination – and they’ll be just as wrong not to let go.