The Driverless Car Is Coming. Here's Why You Care.

I always wonder if I’m stretching the boundaries of civil Mopar discussion by bringing up the topic of driverless cars, but believe me, if you love driving your Mopar and don’t care about this, you need to.

- Johnny Hunkins

It’s mid-September as I write this, and the number-one taxi service on the planet— Uber—has just announced it will be rolling out a driverless version of its service in Pittsburgh. I personally have never used a service like this, but Mopar Muscle publisher Michael Essex uses it regularly and swears by it. I’m a car guy, so I’ll always choose to take the wheel even if it’s a crappy rental, but Essex likes it because it allows him to get a ton of extra work done in traffic. Meh.

My knee-jerk reaction as a car guy is, what’s the point? Driverless cars are ugly, they’re slow, and they rob you of the wonderfully immersive driving experience. But that landscape is rapidly changing. Early in 2016, I watched Jay Leno try to beat an Audi RS7’s lap time at Sonoma Raceway on an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. He did it, but only just barely, and with a good bit of experience under his belt. As a gearhead, all kinds of questions spin in my head. If high-performance cars like the Hellcat could be made selfdriving, would it be just as fun? Maybe. The less-experienced could see firsthand what a truly awesome run down the quarter-mile, or a lap around Watkins Glen, feels like. Will tuners, hackers, and aftermarket programmers be in the business of reprogramming the self-driving software? Will they do it for fun? To be malicious? Who’s on the hook for damages when intelligent cruise control and driverless cars fail? We’ll find out soon with the verdict from The Family of Joshua Brown v Tesla Motors.