How it feels to ride in a self-driving car - July 2021

It's July 7th, 2021, and I went for my first ride in a self-driving car yesterday. And while I had been following the story of self-driving cars, reading stuff, watching videos, it wasn't until the exact moment when I was in the car and it started moving that I got a real human feeling. And that's what I'd like to share with you today. And I have to compare it to things that most people know.

It's an ordinary minivan, and you walk up to it, open the door and get in. The voice greeted me by name, which was nice (although it wasn't as if there were a lot of other self-driving vans pulling up and other people getting in - they're preparing for that). To me, it felt a lot like sitting on a plane. There was a little screen in front of me that asked me to push a button, but mostly I just sat there looking out the window on my left.

I sat behind the "driver's seat" so I really couldn't see the steering wheel turn. Speaking for myself, I've always been a disinterested passenger, and I rarely do much to help the driver, assuming that they want to be left alone. I've never, ever, walked up to a pilot on a flight to tell him to watch out for that flock of ducks, or whatever. I like to focus on looking out of the window, which is exactly what I did in the self-driving car. I actually had to remind myself every once in a while that this wasn't just an ordinary ride. To me, it just felt like an Uber ride.

You could compare it to riding on a train. Somewhere up there is someone driving, but it's really none of your concern. I was pleased to see the Woman in My Life immediately take out her phone and check on something there, completely at ease and relaxed. I can picture people commuting in self-driving cars doing the same thing that people do on buses, or trains, just reading something, the kind of ordinary things that people do when they've left the driving to someone else.

My plan is to write more about this, maybe later, and then look back on how absolutely silly it is to even talk about it. It will be like someone who is riding an automatic elevator for the first time in the 1940s and describing how they pushed a button! There's an "emergency button" that you can push, like in an elevator has, but I've never used one of those either, in a long life riding in a LOT of elevators.

This felt good, and now that it's history for me, I want to make it part of my future.

Image at the top of the post: Approaching Ray Road, Chandler, Arizona.
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