Everyone sucks at driving

Not me though

Image created using Canva and faces.notion.com

Every day, I steel myself for battle. It's me—Ayrton Senna-incarnate versus a whole city of troglodytes in their wheeled tin cans.

I steel myself to face a whole host of enemies. You have pickup trucks, designed for farm life and used for Target runs. Lanes are a mere suggestion for these vehicles.

You have SUVs. Based on their growing figure, the S that stood for "sport" now stands for "sumo." Even their dashboard screens have grown; soon enough every SUV will have an IMAX screen.¹

And then you have Teslas. Fucking Teslas.

Tesla drivers are the worst. They react too late, leave a stadium-sized gap between cars, and swerve all the time. To add insult to injury, people drive Teslas in one of two ways: either attempting to break the land speed record or pushing a grocery cart with a wobbly wheel. There's no in-between.

I used to love driving. It represented freedom, exploration, and quality time with my Spotify playlists. But my daily commute is now marked by evasive maneuvers from drivers in cars twice the size of mine, who seem to have no qualms about driving head down, with the phone screen lighting up their face—"eyes on the road" be damned.

There’s been a rise of this type of anti-social driving behavior post-COVID. And studies are showing that drivers are angrier² and more distracted.³ The hazards of this behavior are compounded by two factors: cars are getting bigger; and thus, more lethal, and cars are getting smarter; and thus, turning us into dumber drivers.

Carflation

Driving my Subaru Impreza, by no means a small car, amidst a sea of Ford F-150s and Chevrolet Silverados feels like being a sardine in a school of sharks.

The spoke of the wheels spinning menacingly near eye level, their engines roaring in an uneasy bark that invites me to keep my distance, and the enormity of these chassis makes me yearn for the days where pick up trucks were actually used to carry hay and didn’t look like urban tanks.

Cars have grown shark-sized and it appears they will continue to do so. Pick-up trucks have ballooned from 4,000 pounds in the 1970s to over 5,000 pounds today⁴, and eight out of the ten best-selling vehicles in 2024 are SUVs or trucks.

We’ve entered a vicious cycle of consistent demand for large vehicles for two reasons: Americans are buying bigger vehicles to be better protected from other big vehicles around them (see my unease above), and because having a large car has become a status symbol for Americans, with their preferred model changing per subculture: Ford F-150s if you lean conservative, Tesla Cybertrucks if you are in tech, and Mercedes’ G Wagons if you are an Iranian living in LA.⁵

The consequences of carflation, however, are deadly. Between 2013 and 2021, fatal crashes increased by 30% according to the NHTSA⁶. While correlation isn't causation, physics is unforgiving: when vehicles get bigger and heavier, collisions become more lethal.

Car Brained

Cars haven't only gotten bigger; they've also gotten smarter. The latest models come equipped with a host of smart features—lane departure warnings, blind spot detection, adaptive cruise control, and automatic breaking. These technologies seem to be making roads slightly safer: The same NHTSA report cited above shows that traffic deaths have gone down since they peaked, going from 42,939 in 2021 to 40,990 in 2023.

But the downside of our cars getting smarter seems to be drivers not using their brains. A State Farm report⁷ found that drivers in vehicles with these magical safety features engaged in more dangerous behaviors like texting while driving, holding their phones while talking, and even video chatting.⁸

The more you automate driving, the less you feel as a driver that you have to pay attention. If Jesus is taking the wheel, why wouldn't you be able to indulge in that Reel your best friend sent you?

These assistive features could very well be a net positive, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of engaging with our environment and understanding our inherent responsibility when we are behind the wheel.

The Future

Last fall, I spent a couple of days in San Francisco and got to ride a Waymo robo taxi. Even though you know what you are getting into, a driverless car, there is that inevitable sense of wonder, kinda like when somebody catches your nose with their hand.⁹

The unease of seeing the steering wheel move by itself quickly gave way to the feeling that I was safe, aboard a vehicle designed to be 100% focused on driving. No human hesitation, no last-minute lane changes, no aggressive acceleration.

I began to fantasize about a future where robo taxis become the norm, and fully autonomous vehicles are the standard. In this future, I do believe that traffic casualties will become a remarkable occurrence, not a phenomenon that happens every 14 minutes.¹⁰ I’ll miss driving, but a future where road rage is a rarity is far more appealing.

Though my true fantasy would be for public transit infrastructure of cities like Amsterdam or Tokyo in every major US metro. I’m not holding my breath on that one; local governments remain shy about building the public transit infrastructure we deserve out of the fear that low ridership and expensive projects become their political harakiri.

Until that future arrives though, we are stuck in this messy middle: Some cars are more autonomous than others. Anti-social driving behaviors show no sign of decreasing. People still beat up robo taxis because grrr technology! and for most Americans the decision of going car-free is more of a courageous choice than a practical one.

It’s Me, I’m the Problem

Since I’ll keep driving I have to face an uneasy truth:

Everyone is a bad driver—and I’m just as bad as others.

I grow vividly impatient when someone is just a tad slower than I want. I speed up to block lane-mergers, then slow down just enough to trap them behind other cars. I am petty, unrepentant, and overly sensitive on the road.

Until our autonomous future arrives, I have a choice: keep fueling the road rage or accept that the driver I'm cursing at is probably composing their own mental essay about what a terrible driver I am.

When I tell my grandchildren about these wild times, I'll sit them on my lap and tell them about the time when humans drove cars themselves. I'll describe our uneven adhesion to speed limits, our neck contortions when backing up, and using the Pythagorean theorem to parallel park.¹¹

Hopefully, I'll have the honesty to admit what a bad driver I was.

Me after I bought my current car, May 2020.

1. Christopher Nolan is probably celebrating somewhere.

2. In 2018, at least 58 road rage shooting deaths occurred in the United States; by 2023, the number had doubled to 118. The same trend occurred with gun injuries: at least 160 people were wounded in a road rage incident in 2018, with a staggering increase to 365 people in 2023. Source .

3. From a Washington State report from the Traffic Commission: “Distracted driving behavior on city streets soared from less than one of every ten drivers to nearly one of every five drivers, an increase that is statistically significant.” Source.

4. From the Journal of Consumer Research.

5. Sorry, I meant Tehrangeles.

6. NTHSA Report (PDF).

7. State Farm report.

8. Which is wild because why would you expose your double-chin like that?

9. I fall for it every time.

10. Calculated by looking at data from the NHTSA.

11. a² + b² = bumper scratch