A car nut’s view of a driverless world

I got my first taste of the drug on a motorcycle – a canary-yellow Suzuki PE175 – in the early 1980s. It was a fourth-hand boneshaker which you could hear before you could see coming.

After two other bikes and thousands of kilometres clocked in Malaysia and Thailand I transitioned to four wheels. And my addiction quickly deepened. It would have been an impossibly expensive addiction too, if not for a job that has allowed me access to showrooms full of good, bad and even ugly cars.

I have driven more than 1,000 of them, and I still love being at the wheel. 

In Singapore, where I live, driving is mostly painless – certainly more painless than in any other city with a similar population density.

Getting behind the wheel is often three times faster than commuting by public transport here, too. But to me, driving is more than getting from A to B.

The notion of being in control of a machine that delivers motion, speed, grace, power and comfort in a climate-controlled personal space is incredibly liberating.

And being at the wheel of even the humblest car is therapeutic. You can zone out and focus on nothing but the road, the car and the world passing you by, one lamppost at a time.

For these reasons and more, I have mixed feelings about autonomous cars. The geek in me looks forward to the day when I can summon a driverless pod via my phone and be transported to my destination by a ghost in the machine, as it were, with minimal fuss.

But the driver in me is reluctant to surrender my free will to an algorithm that decides, among other things, whom I should share my journey with – leaving me at the mercy of the co-passenger who stinks of stale tobacco and coughs like a tubercular donkey. Unlike in a train, you cannot move to another carriage.

Make no mistake, the world of autonomous vehicles is attractive to city planners and policymakers because of the huge potential for transport efficiency. And that potential is realisable only if vehicles are shared – intensively.

Think of it as an extreme form of UberPool, without drivers. 

But there is no proof that self-driving cars would lead to more efficient transport. There are studies which indicate that robot vehicles will in fact lead to higher demand for cars and higher energy consumption.

For one thing, many of those now too young, too old or disabled to drive will want access to driverless cars.

The wealthy will want to own their own, preferably with a manual override. The quota for vehicle ownership that Singapore currently operates will likely continue to be relevant.

People will not mind living farther away from their workplaces, since the tedium of driving long distances will disappear, replaced by time in the passenger seat that can be used productively.

Driverless cars will have to either cruise without passengers in anticipation of demand or park in far-off places – both of which mean greater energy consumption.

And because robot cars will operate like bees in a hive, they will be vulnerable to systems-wide glitches that will paralyse part of or the entire fleet. The outcome of such glitches will be akin to those which affect our trains today.

And if buses are autonomous too, they will be exposed to similar risks.

Looming in the windscreen is a brave new world full of promise and peril. And to insure ourselves against the latter, this new road must be made wide enough to accommodate people who prefer to drive.