Book Description

From famed automotive journalist Jason Torchinsky, of Jalopnik and Jay Leno's Garage, comes a witty insider's guide to make sense of self-driving cars and predict the road ahead. Self-driving cars sound fantastical and futuristic and yet they'll soon be on every street in America. Whether it's Tesla's Autopilot, Google's Waymo, Mercedes's Distronic, or Uber's modified Volvos, companies around the world are developing autonomous cars. But why? And what will they mean for the auto industry and humanity at large? In Robot, Take the Wheel, Torchinsky gives a colorful account of the development of autonomous vehicles and their likely implications. He encourages us to think of self-driving cars as an entirely new machine, something beyond cars as we understand them today, and considers how humans will get along with these robots that will take over our cars' jobs, what they will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what we can expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can have fun with them, and how we can make sure there's still a place for those of us who love to drive, especially with a manual transmission. This vibrant volume explores what's ahead and what we can do now to shape the automated future.