The New Republic investigates how millionaires promised a technologically sophisticated future in order to push public transport aside and manufacture unsafe automobiles that spy on us.
This can be difficult to keep up with the slew of bad decisions and controversies in the automotive business alone, but a New Republic story manages to tie everything together, and boy, is it a sobering look at our collective condition.
It claims that the reason our self-driving paradise hasn’t come is because it was never actually supposed to. Instead, the promise of self-driving vehicles was really a ploy to dissuade towns from investing in public transport, which is something America’s scions have been doing since the mass production car spawned a vast galaxy of industries. According to the Republic:
The New York Times reported in 2018 that the Koch brothers were leveraging the potential of driverless automobiles as part of their campaign against public transport. The libertarian billionaires and old fossil fuel supporters were supporting Americans for Prosperity to organise dozens of campaigns in cities and states throughout the country to oppose legislation that would increase funding for public transportation. One of their main points was that public transport was obsolete and a waste of money because self-driving cars were only a few years away. We’re still waiting for the self-driving revolution five years later, but the Koch brothers’ bad-faith beliefs about public transport persist.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company toured around the country in the mid-2010s, selling communities on its automobile tunnels as solutions to their transportation problems, but rarely provided any actual goods. Consider Fort Lauderdale: The city need a new train tunnel and approached the Boring Company. However, once a contract was signed in 2021, the Boring Company sold the city on creating a tunnel for Teslas to the beach rather than a train. Nothing had been erected as of earlier this year, and local media speculated that the transaction might be dead.
The Hyperloop may be the most glaring fake solution. Musk introduced the modern form of the notion as a pure hypothetical a decade ago. Musk, a well-known opponent of public transport, saw it as a means to undermine support for California’s proposed high-speed rail route 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 dream? “High-speed rail would be cancelled,” Vance explained.
Elon Musk’s disdain for public transport is well known, but you wouldn’t expect someone who sells luxury cars for private use to be a big fan of public transport, would you? Instead of tackling our transportation pollution problem (which has become worse), vehicle crash problem (which is still terribly awful), or car ownership problem (which is more expensive than ever), computer geniuses designed automobiles that could farm a whole new sector: the data industry. Whether you like it or not, the product is you, the car owner:
All of that car data raises privacy issues. The Driver Privacy Act of 2015 only applies to data on a vehicle’s Event Data Recorder, not everything else it generates. A congressional caucus has been formed to investigate the matter, but it has not progressed, nor has the option of passing a comprehensive federal data privacy bill. The European Union is aggressively investigating in-car data and plans to develop legislation to cover it, but politicians there haven’t gotten very far either—and as the law tries to catch up, automakers continue to install even more advanced technology into our vehicles.
Another business model is enabled by the internet connectivity required for data collecting in a car: subscription services. Automakers increasingly expect drivers to pay monthly or yearly fees for car options rather than simply selecting what they want when they buy it. This is not limited to one or two corporations, but affects all of the major players. BMW charges for heated seats, Mercedes charges for better acceleration, Tesla charges for additional connectivity capabilities, and GM has big plans to increase its subscription offerings—and the revenues that come with them—in the coming years.
The future of transportation appears bleak, from self-driving promises that have gone cold to the rise of subscription-based features on automobiles to huge EVs that pollute as much as an ICE sedan. Perhaps it is time to cease allowing self-interested parties to have so much power in public affairs. Of course, simply making the darn trains is no easy chore.