How The Self-Driving Car Dream Became An Absolute Nightmare

In 2018, the New York Times reported on how the Koch brothers were using the prospect of driverless cars as part of their war against public transit. The libertarian billionaires and longtime fossil fuel allies were funding Americans for Prosperity to organize dozens of campaigns in cities and states around the country to stop measures that would put more money into transit service. One of their primary arguments was that public transit was outdated and a waste of money because self-driving cars were just a few years away. Five years later, we’re still waiting for the self-driving revolution—but the Koch brothers’ bad-faith ideas about public transportation are still around.

During the mid-2010s, Elon Musk’s Boring Company went around the country selling cities on its car tunnels as solutions to their transportation woes, but rarely delivered any tangible product. Take Fort Lauderdale: The city needed a new train tunnel and went to the Boring Company. But once a deal was signed in 2021, the Boring Company instead sold the city not on building a train, but rather on building a tunnel for Teslas to the beach. As of earlier this year, nothing had been built, and local media was reporting that the deal could be dead.

The most egregious false solution may be the Hyperloop. The modern version of the concept was proposed by Musk a decade ago as a pure hypothetical. Musk, a noted public transit hater, saw it as a way to reduce support for California’s planned high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “It seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train,” reporter Ashlee Vance wrote in his 2015 biography of Musk. “He didn’t actually intend to build the thing.” Musk’s ultimate hope? “High-speed rail would be canceled,” explained Vance.

All that vehicle data comes with its own privacy concerns. The Driver Privacy Act of 2015 only covers data on a car’s Event Data Recorder—not everything else they’re generating. There has been some effort to get a congressional caucus together to examine the issue, but it hasn’t gotten far, nor has the alternative of passing a comprehensive federal data privacy bill. The European Union is actively examining in-car data and plans to craft rules to cover it, but lawmakers there haven’t gotten far, either—and as the law tries to catch up, automakers are continuing to put even more new tech into our vehicles.

The internet connectivity required for data collection in a car also enables another business model: subscription services. Automakers are now expecting drivers to shell out monthly or yearly for car features instead of just choosing what they want when they buy it. This is not isolated to just one or two companies, but all the major players. BMW is charging to enable heated seats, Mercedes is doing the same with faster acceleration, Tesla charges for additional connectivity features, and GM has big plans to expand its subscription offerings—and the revenues it derives from them—in the coming years.