The Everyday Automotive Future Could Be A Slow Back-Seat Ride To Boredom

Waymo has opened its Californian doors to the media, showcasing the self-driving tech that it says could feed the next generation of ride-hailing and public transport systems, and the slowness of the experience is an unavoidable future reality.

It might be advanced, but that doesn’t stop even non-car-journalists calling Waymo’s self-driving cars slow…

Waymo’s fully-autonomous cars drive around even more slowly than we petrolheads might already fear, according to an unexpectedly reliable source. But even we wouldn’t realistically want it any other way.

The notoriously anti-car Guardian newspaper isn’t normally a source of automotive insight for us. That said, when a media brand that so detests CT’s favourite subject calls a driving experience slow, you know it really must have been.

In a piece that largely praises Waymo’s technology for being able to handle ‘random’ cyclists, human-driven cars and more, as part of a carefully controlled test environment (just like the real world, then), journalist Julia Carrie Wong described the cars as “driving with the level of care you might take if you had a wedding cake in the backseat.”

Now, on the face of it you might expect us to fly off the handle and slam this impeding snooze-fest. Believe me, we’d love to. But would you really want to get on board a Johnny Cab only to be slammed back in your seat, flung hard enough around corners to smack your head into the side glass and send your smartphone tumbling out of your hand toward cracked screen hell? Probably not.

When you’re not in control of the car, driving fast is much, much less fun. It’s okay to admit that your one friend who always drives too fast around other traffic is actually being a bit of a tool. Near misses happen, but to invite them with bad driving is an experience no passenger enjoys. A vehicle where everyone inside is a passenger has to put comfort and relaxation as its priorities.

Could it be made fun? Not in any way that people like us are interested in, no. The only fun would come from in-car entertainment, like a big stereo or Blu-ray players. The future of ‘driving’ looks like it might be hellishly boring. Can we accept that? Well, perhaps the more important question is: will we even have a choice?