Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—And How It Will Reshape Our World

Imagine a city where streets are choked with traffic, parking lots stretch as far as the eye can see, and the air shimmers with the heat of idling engines. This was the world we built around the car—a world that promised freedom but delivered congestion, pollution, and an endless search for parking. But what if I told you that for every hour your car spends on the road, it spends nineteen sitting idle? That’s right: the average car is used only 5% of the time. The rest of the time, it’s just taking up space—at home, at work, at the mall—waiting for its next brief journey.

It’s not just about wasted space. It’s about wasted energy. Less than 2% of the gasoline you pour into your tank actually moves you down the road. The rest is lost as heat, sound, or powering the air conditioner and radio. The cars we buy are built for the rare road trip or the occasional family outing, but day after day, they shuttle just one or two people at a time, crawling through traffic at speeds slower than a bicycle. We’ve built our lives, our cities, and our economy around a tool that is, in many ways, spectacularly inefficient.

This inefficiency has consequences. Our cities devote vast amounts of valuable land to parking lots and garages. We pave over green spaces, creating heat islands that make summers hotter and air dirtier. The emissions from our cars are a leading cause of climate change, and the cost of owning, maintaining, and insuring a vehicle is a burden for many. It’s no wonder that some have called the automobile the world’s most underutilized asset and the auto industry the most disruptable business on earth.

But this story isn’t just about problems. It’s about the courage to imagine something better. As one wise voice once said, 'I’m not afraid of new ideas—I’m afraid of the old ones.' The seeds of change are sown when we dare to question the status quo. In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore how visionaries began to reimagine mobility, and how a series of unlikely events set the stage for a revolution in the way we move.

Let’s turn the page to see how frustration, innovation, and a dash of serendipity sparked the quest for autonomy.