Interesting Times: Why Are We Still Driving?
Episode
58 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Startups, Fundraising & VC, Sales & Revenue
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Safety baseline: Autonomous vehicles already outperform human drivers in safety metrics according to California's mandatory transparency data, even within San Francisco's complex road environment. With 40,000 Americans dying annually in road incidents — nearly all caused by driver error — Miller argues that any AV system performing better than the human average saves lives on net and should be permitted to scale.
- ✓2035 adoption timeline: Miller projects that by 2035, most major North American cities will have substantial robotaxi fleets operating commercially. Waymo has already announced expansion into 15-plus cities. The key scaling variables are cost reduction on Waymo's sensor-heavy lidar approach versus Tesla's camera-only bet, which would allow mass vehicle production at significantly lower per-unit cost.
- ✓Liability as the critical unlock: The single regulatory barrier slowing AV adoption is unresolved liability. Miller's proposed framework is direct: manufacturers must accept 100% liability when their automated driving system is at fault. Waymo already accepts this standard for its current fleet. Tesla has resisted equivalent accountability for its driver-assist systems, which Miller identifies as a credibility problem requiring regulatory enforcement.
- ✓Remote assistance vs. full autonomy: Waymo vehicles are not fully independent — they use remote human operators who provide navigational guidance when the system encounters ambiguous situations, such as partially displaced traffic cones. Operators do not remotely drive the car but instead send directional waypoints. This distinction matters for understanding actual autonomy levels versus marketed capabilities across competing platforms.
- ✓Bad scenario trigger points: The dystopian AV outcome involves robotaxis becoming cheap enough to pull riders away from public transit, triggering a death spiral where transit agencies lose revenue, cut service, raise fares, and lose more riders — leaving low-income populations with reduced mobility. The fork between good and bad outcomes depends on whether transit agencies integrate robotaxis as feeder vehicles rather than treating them as competitors.
What It Covers
Transportation policy writer Andrew Miller joins Ross Douthat on Interesting Times to examine the accelerating shift toward autonomous vehicles. The conversation covers Waymo's safety record, Tesla's competing approach, liability frameworks, the 2035 timeline for mainstream robotaxi adoption, and what Americans stand to lose culturally when machines replace human drivers.
Key Questions Answered
- •Safety baseline: Autonomous vehicles already outperform human drivers in safety metrics according to California's mandatory transparency data, even within San Francisco's complex road environment. With 40,000 Americans dying annually in road incidents — nearly all caused by driver error — Miller argues that any AV system performing better than the human average saves lives on net and should be permitted to scale.
- •2035 adoption timeline: Miller projects that by 2035, most major North American cities will have substantial robotaxi fleets operating commercially. Waymo has already announced expansion into 15-plus cities. The key scaling variables are cost reduction on Waymo's sensor-heavy lidar approach versus Tesla's camera-only bet, which would allow mass vehicle production at significantly lower per-unit cost.
- •Liability as the critical unlock: The single regulatory barrier slowing AV adoption is unresolved liability. Miller's proposed framework is direct: manufacturers must accept 100% liability when their automated driving system is at fault. Waymo already accepts this standard for its current fleet. Tesla has resisted equivalent accountability for its driver-assist systems, which Miller identifies as a credibility problem requiring regulatory enforcement.
- •Remote assistance vs. full autonomy: Waymo vehicles are not fully independent — they use remote human operators who provide navigational guidance when the system encounters ambiguous situations, such as partially displaced traffic cones. Operators do not remotely drive the car but instead send directional waypoints. This distinction matters for understanding actual autonomy levels versus marketed capabilities across competing platforms.
- •Bad scenario trigger points: The dystopian AV outcome involves robotaxis becoming cheap enough to pull riders away from public transit, triggering a death spiral where transit agencies lose revenue, cut service, raise fares, and lose more riders — leaving low-income populations with reduced mobility. The fork between good and bad outcomes depends on whether transit agencies integrate robotaxis as feeder vehicles rather than treating them as competitors.
Notable Moment
Miller notes a political paradox: traditionally libertarian red states like Texas and Tennessee are currently the most permissive toward autonomous vehicle deployment, while progressive blue states outside California impose the most regulatory friction — meaning the states most culturally attached to individual freedom are accelerating the technology that may eventually eliminate it.
Episode Transcript
This podcast is supported by Atlassian Rovo, AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. What if AI handled the busy work for you? Updating Jira tickets, drafting campaign briefs in Confluence, writing project updates, all without you lifting a finger. Meet Rovo, AI that works where your team already works, using your company's data and permissions to take action. Get started with Rovo at rovo.com. Hello, Hard Fork listeners, friends of the show, loyal forkers, enemies of the show, rivals, nemeses. We are getting geared up for Hard Fork live in just a week and a half. It's going to be a great show, and we're so excited to see so many of you there. We will be bringing you all of that fun in the podcast feed, so stay tuned for that. But this week, we are off, and we're bringing you a conversation about the shift to driverless cars, one of our favorite topics. This is an episode of the podcast Interesting Times hosted by Ross Douthat, and it is called why are we still driving? Ross talks with Andrew Miller who writes about transportation policy and the future of self driving cars. I found this a really enjoyable conversation. I learned a lot from it, and I hope you enjoy this. We'll be back in your feed soon with a bunch of interviews and Shenanigans from Hard Fork Live. Yeah. Now if you'll excuse us, we have to go paint those sets. Are we painting the sets? I thought we had someone for that. No. They, Budget cuts. We spent all the budget on your wardrobe. We we did. From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, And this is Interesting Times. It feels like we've been hearing about self driving cars for a long time, But now they're really here, ferrying people to work and school and nightlife from Los Angeles to Nashville, and poised to spread to just about every big city in America. My guest this week is very optimistic about a future where the cars take over. He writes about self driving automobiles and transportation policy on his substack, changing lanes, and he's the coauthor of a recent book with the stark title, The End of Driving. We talked about the potential benefits of this transformation. And as someone who kind of loves the open road, I pressed him on what's lost in freedom and mastery and the very birthright of Americans if we don't have to be in the driver's seat anymore. Andrew Miller, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So I want you to start by giving me a sales pitch for self driving cars. Explain why people might welcome them. What would be good about a self driving future? So we can approach this from the micro or the macro level. At the the macro level, forty thousand Americans die every year in road incidents, and that is only those …
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