![]() It had wings (called fins) like an airplane. It was a used 1960 Chevy Impala I bought for $450 in 1966 from tip money I got delivering groceries by bike from my father’s grocery store in south Brooklyn. Seven paragraphs into the introduction, Schwartz recalls his first vehicle: But before he gets to detailing valid arguments about mobility and the impact of driverless vehicles on the urban environment, Schwartz must first establish that cars have made him feel. The best of these offerings is No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future (2018) by Samuel I. In many, though not all, of these initial offerings, a ghostwriter helped some transportation official from the public or private sector condense their career into zippy, pun-filled prose. The first wave of AV books was published from roughly 2016 through the first half of 2019. Their sentiments mirror my own, which have calcified into three words after immersing myself in this lavishly funded, hilariously inept enterprise for a few years: it ain’t working. New voices in and around AV are now working to deflate the sector’s nonetheless buoyant optimism. For years, there’s been a horse-race mentality to AV discussions: Who will be first to market? In 2020, the gossip has begun to invert: Who will be the first to collapse? The looming Covid-19-induced economic collapse will bankrupt some AV companies. Already shaky business plans for robotaxis or autonomous rideshares now likely need to add a line item for a human to sanitize screens and interiors between rides (better yet-they’ll develop an automated system that doesn’t work). Companies championing electric models now must compete in a global marketplace of declining oil prices. Even if the AV sector did have products to sell, it would be a challenging business climate. It turns out that it matters, particularly when global pandemics like Covid-19 start infecting every balance sheet on the planet. Even “industry” is incorrect-most AV companies don’t yet produce goods, services, or revenue.Ībout revenue. And yet the inaccuracy of the designation is precisely why I find it so fitting, seeing as all new terms in the industry are either meaningless or inaccurate (see: “partial self-driving” and “autopilot”). The motley collection of nonfiction titles covers far more than autonomy. It should be noted that “AV books” is not only a bad name but an inaccurate one. Sure, autonomous vehicle books have flaws, but unlike much of the underlying artificial intelligence of these chimerical vehicles, the books at least improve with every update. Reading the genre these past few years has been like witnessing a coming-of-age story-the first titles, though terrific introductions, are too enfeebled by nostalgia to seriously challenge the industry in adolescence, the genre sizes up its foe the emergent third-wave witnesses a heroic, cathartic breakthrough. Sure, AV books have flaws, but unlike much of the underlying artificial intelligence of these chimerical vehicles, the books at least improve with every update. Listening to AV company founders on podcasts and at conferences will only teach you how soon they have a funding round coming up. Reading AV Twitter will only teach you to blame misleading headlines on journalists as opposed to the companies that create misleading timelines for their misleadingly named technologies. I have become obsessed with these AV books, in part because the “coverage” of the undertaking is so unappealing. They no doubt procrastinated, often severely, and still, still they beat the wunderkind roboticists of the autonomous vehicle (AV) realm to the marketplace. ![]() As massive companies like Volvo, General Motors, Tesla, and others spent the 2010s missing preposterously optimistic release dates for their driverless prototypes, writers conducted research and interviews. Book-length analysis has sped past tech-sector hype. For what feels like the first time in the twenty-first century, prose has outrun product. In the past half decade, a small publishing miracle has taken place: many books about driverless cars are available for purchase, whereas driverless cars are not.
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