GM’s method, by contrast, is to slowly expand “eyes-off” capabilities to more sorts of roads, letting drivers text or eat or watch YouTube first on some highways, and then on more highways, and then on local roads, and then maybe everywhere.
That’s when the automaker’s vision gets bigger and blurrier. The cabin, the company says in a blog post, can become a space to “relax, work, and unwind. … In time, this will pave the way for a future where your car can take on everyday errands,” the company says. The personal self-driving car will pick up groceries, drop off children, and then maybe even find a parking spot at the end.
Urban planners and infrastructure experts have worried about this vision. If you lower the price of a car trip, in money and time spent driving, won’t everyone send their cars out for every task? Won’t the roads be crowded with pods full of people sleeping, emailing, and YouTubing while their vehicles slowly pilot them onward—or worse, cars with no one in them? Won’t cities become sprawlier?
Anderson says yes. If you have cheap, personal driving robots, “you will very likely incur more of those robots on the roads. And so there’s a lot of societal and infrastructural considerations to make here,” he says. But he argues we have time, and that cities take time to sprawl. “I wouldn’t call this an imminent thing, but it certainly is something we should be thinking about.”