Car Wars
The stakes are impossibly high. Self-driving cars are arguably the great technological promise of the 21st century.
They are in that rare class of technology that might actually change the world. And not just in the way everyone in Silicon Valley talks about changing the world—but really, fundamentally change it. So much so that their dramatic life-saving potential is almost secondary to the other economic, cultural, and aesthetic transformations they would cause.
Those who aren’t able to drive themselves today—people who are blind, for example—would be granted a new level of transportation freedom. Mass adoption of self-driving cars would create and destroy entire industries, alter the way people work and move through cities, and change the way those cities are designed and connected.
To build the technology that prompts all this change is to be in an enormous position of power.
That’s why is so intense. It’s also what makes this particular competition echo other transformative moments in technological history—going all the way.) “The Wright brothers jump into my brain immediately,” John Leonard, an engineering professor at M.I.T., . “But maybe it’s kind of like a decentralized space race. Like Sputnik, but between the traditional car companies and their suppliers versus tech companies and their startups.”
