brendan halpin

Last Friday I was in San Francisco and rented a car so I could go see ancient redwoods. They gave me a Tesla model Y, which marked the first time I’d been behind the wheel of one. I rented a Chevy Bolt in Cincinnati last spring and loved it, so I figured a Tesla would be cool to drive for a day.

It was not. It was not cool at all. I honestly have no idea how these cars got popular. Here’s something I didn’t know—the dashboard right in front of the wheel is bare—all the car info is on the giant touchscreen you have to look away from the road in order to operate. Apart from the touchscreen, the only controls were two identical little wheels on the steering wheel that you can use to scroll through stuff on the screen and select it. At least that’s what the one on the left seemed to do. No idea what the right one did.

There was light, intermittent rain on part of the drive, and I had to get my daughter to operate the wipers for me because they’re controlled through the touchscreen. (I guess you’re just supposed to leave them on auto, but it turns out the car didn’t know when I needed the windshield cleared as well as I did). And, mind you, they’re not easily accessible right there on the touchscreen— you have to click on a menu to open the screen to control the wipers. And the lights. I am not making this up. Once I had to pull over and wanted to put my hazard lights on. No idea how one does this in this car. I guess it’s in a menu somewhere.

I liked the way the screen filled with the rear camera image when I was changing lanes, but a back window I could actually see out of would have been even better. Half the touchscreen is dedicated to a digital rendering of the environment you can see out the windows. I don’t know why this is supposed to be good or useful.

Fortunately the turn signals were on a stalk off the steering wheel, as was the shift lever. This was a weird choice, but I guess something you’d get used to in time.

Overall this thing was just so overengineered as to be, in my opinion, unsafe to drive, at least as a rental. I assume if you’ve shelled out the money for one, you get used to how many times you have to move and click the scroll wheel in order to turn the wipers on, but otherwise, you have to re-learn how to use a lot of basic features of a car.

And, mind you, I have driven cars with touchscreens before. But they usually are quick and intuitive to navigate and don’t bury the wipers, lights, and hazards in a menu.

So—I was willing to give Tesla owners who bought before Elon came out as a Nazi the benefit of the doubt, but now I’m feeling much less charitable.

*

Most of the time I was in San Francisco we got around by public transportation or walking or taking the occasional Lyft, but twice we booked rides in self-driving Waymo cars. The streets of San Francisco are thick with these driverless taxis, and I felt like we had to book one just to say we’d done it.

I am, overall, a bit of a tech skeptic, so I was prepared to find many reasons to hate this experience. But I surprised myself by loving it.

It was a smooth, uneventful ride in a car that obeyed traffic laws and got us where we needed to go. I thought it would be scary, but I never felt scared. (A marked contrast to the ride we got from the airport to our hotel, when the guy drove so fast and recklessly that I thought we might perish.)

Let me say as an aside that I was a Lyft driver for 6 months in 2016, so I’m not here to shit on the hardworking people who do that job for too little money. But I am here to say that Waymo cars operate under entirely different incentives than Ubers or Lyfts.

When I was driving for Lyft, the company got to have it both ways—the bonuses keyed to the number of rides given and the fare calculation that paid more for distance than time meant that I needed to squeeze as many rides as possible into each hour I was driving, so I would make more money if I drove faster.

BUT, if I got in an accident, Lyft was off the hook—they assumed no liability for my driving, and they wouldn’t fix my car.

Waymo’s incentives are different. Because the company owns the cars, they of course make more money when their cars are not in the repair shop, which means they have a monetary incentive to follow traffic laws. (Also I imagine if some of the camera and I guess lidar stuff on the outside of the car gets damaged, it’s probably very expensive to fix.)

Also, if a Waymo vehicle is at fault in an accident, the company would be responsible. So, again, they win by being safe.

I should add that human drivers get tired and sick and distracted (and of course they are incentivized to work under these conditions by the rideshare apps), and self-driving cars do not.

I commute via bike on Boston streets, and, honestly, I think that driving safely is beyond most people. We all get distracted, we all get tired, we all occasionally (or perhaps as a matter of course) make dumb snap decisions behind the wheel.

I would of course prefer a robust network of bike infrastructure and public transportation, but if we have to have cars, I say let the robots drive ‘em. They’re better at it than we are.