Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Torchinsky is the cofounder of The Autopian and one of today’s leading writers on cars and technology. Previously, he was senior editor of Jalopnik, a producer of Jay Leno’s Garage, which he’s guest starred on, and the star of his own show, Jason Drives, which featured Torchinsky driving obscure cars and has had millions of views on social media. He is also the coauthor Ad Nauseam, has contributed to a wealth of publications, such as Boing Boing, Make, and Mother Jones, and is a stand-up comedian and an artist whose work has exhibited around the world. Torchinsky lives in Chapel Hill, NC. Beau Boeckmann is president and COO of Galpin Motors, America’s most recognized dealership group and home of the highest volume Ford dealer in the world. In 2006 Boeckmann founded Galpin Auto Sports, which led to a starring role and production title on the #1 rated automotive television show, Pimp My Ride. Boeckmann has been honored with several industry awards including the Peterson Automotive Museum’s first Visionary Award and was inducted into the National Rod & Custom Car Hall of Fame. Boeckmann serves as a key member of Ford Motor Company’s Product Committee, Aston Martin’s Dealer Advisory Panel, and the Ford Dealers Advertising Association. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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This book is about the coming age of autonomous cars and is an attempt to get you to consider them as something beyond cars as we understand them today. It’s not a book about the details of the technology, because that changes so fast and so many people so much smarter than me can write those books. This book is essentially a giant thought experiment, where we’ll try and imagine what the coming of autonomous vehicles means to us, how we’ll get along with the robots that will take over our cars’ jobs, what these things will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what can we expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can have fun with them, and how those of us who love to drive, manually and laboriously, can continue to do so.

It’s probably worth pointing out just what sort of a book this will be. If you’re looking for something crammed full of the latest facts, statistics, and research about autonomous cars and their development and up-to-the-minute information about the current state-of-the art cars, this isn’t that book. If you want that, look on the internet. It gets updated far more often than books do, and you’ll be much happier. I don’t want to compete with the internet for anything like that, because I’ll lose.

This book also doesn’t reach out to too many experts, despite how often PR people and agents for these experts like to email me. I’m not ignoring the experts in the field out of any disrespect, but the truth is that the full impact of autonomous cars isn’t even close to being felt. Even if an expert has more degrees than a thermometer, and despite however closely they’re working with this or that autonomous car start-up with acres of venture capital funding, they’re going to be pulling guesses ex recto, just like I am. So I’m just going to give it a go myself, because why not?

Think about this book like that—some guy, we’ll call him “me,” is interested in cars and robots and the culture around both, and is thinking a lot about it and asking a lot of questions, not all of which he has answers to or can even pretend he has answers to.

Because I don’t. But the questions are still worth asking, and it’s still worth thinking about how things could be, how we want them to be, and how we’re afraid they may end up. This is a conversation about what autonomous cars may be or mean or become, and if you’re reading this from some point in the future, laughing about how wrong I was about everything, I can’t say I’ll be too shocked.

This is an exciting era we’re in. Autonomy will be the biggest shift in how we interact with our cars in decades, and it’s going to reshape how we transport ourselves more than any other advancement in recent memory. It’s going to end up far, far weirder than we think, I’m pretty sure, so we may as well get a head start and think some things through.

Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.