New technology threatens ages-old tradition

If autonomous cars become a reality, the concept of driving will cease to exist — imagine that

As a kid, I was a big fan of the Jetsons cartoon show. I loved watching George, his dog Astro and son Elroy zoom around Orbit City in their aerocar. I fully expected to be slipping through the clouds in my own flying saucer when I turned 16. Didn’t happen, of course, although things are getting futuristic fast.

Recently, Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, posted some of her thoughts on what’s next in the automotive world. “I believe we’ll see more change in the automotive industry in the next five to 10 years than in the past 50,” wrote Ms. Barra.

She expects autonomous vehicles to be one of the industry’s top innovations and revealed that next year, almost one thousand GM employees at its Technical Centre in suburban Detroit will begin driving a fleet of fully autonomous Chevrolet Volts.

Now, I’m mostly a traditionalist — a miles and Fahrenheit kind of guy. But I’m fully on-board with the idea of self-driving cars. I mean, what could be better on a sunny summer afternoon than cranking up the Beach Boys, plunking my feet on the dashboard and having a late day snooze while my GPS and sensors thread me through the barrage of stop-and go-maniacs on Hwy. 400.

I’m happy for the car to shoulder the load instead of me sliding onto the shoulder of the road.

However, something is always lost when we surrender to technology. With the advent of self-driving cars, what will happen to the time-honoured tradition of teaching your nearest and dearest how to drive?

Admittedly, like all rites of passage, it can be terrifying but sometimes rewarding.

In my family, driving lessons started in the early 1940s when my Uncle Stan left the family farm to fight in the Second World War. He taught my then-15-year-old dad the rudiments, which dad passed along to his own father. They’d practice across the road at the race track of the Paris Fairgrounds and went round and round in circles until grandpa got the hang of changing gears.

I think he always preferred real horse power, to the kind found under the hood.

My parents gave me lessons in the local IGA parking lot where I’d try and parallel park in between a couple of stacks of shopping carts. It’s a good thing they had wheels because I bent a few buggies.

With our two kids, my wife and I started out double-teaming, a kind of good cop, bad cop routine. She’d start in the front passenger seat, cooing comforting words and from the back seat, I’d shout out really helpful advice, in an increasingly highpitched tone that could smash wine glasses. In fact, we finished off a couple bottles of vino after each lesson. For the highway portion of their education, we turned the kids over to the local driving school. It was worth twice the price.

(I’ve always wondered if my teaching style varied much from such famous father-and-son duos like Henry and Edsel Ford, or Richard and Kyle Petty, or the various generations of Andrettis and Unsers).

If you can’t wait until self-driving cars are as common place as selfies, there is lots of advice available on the Internet on how to teach your kids to drive. I came across a piece that Joe Bargmann wrote for Popular Mechanics in January 2013. Joe had some interesting suggestions.

He encourages students to learn how to drive stick.

“It enhances the feeling of human and machine working in harmony and increases confidence.” Joe has more extreme advice later in the piece.

He thinks students should scan the road for “exit points, because veering into a grassy median is preferable to a collision.” Animal activists may not like the next tip so much.

“If an animal runs into the car’s path, a driver is more likely to avoid personal injury by hitting the critter than by jerking the wheel to avoid it,” wrote Bargmann, who added dryly: “The rule is void if the animal is a moose.”

Maybe it is time for self-driving cars. Freelance writer Ian Cruickshank contributes to special sections of the Toronto Star, particularly Travel, where he writes about golfing vacations. To reach him, email wheels@thestar.ca and put his name in the subject line.