As our clients know we are always on the lookout for new inventions that make life better for people. These ideas help reinforce our thesis that innovations and technologies will continue and this is tethered to our long-term optimism and belief in the stock market. Back in 2018 a book called “No One at the Wheel” caught our attention. The author, Samuel Schwartz had served as New York City’s traffic commissioner and chief engineer. He posited in the book that “driving a car will soon become akin to driving a horse draw carriage”. He had evidentiary reasons to believe that we were on the cusp of the driverless car. We read the book and became fascinated with his arc of progression timeline for this to happen. Swartz wrote that by 2024 the driverless car will be commonplace. That “Jetson-like” forecast did miss the mark but fast forward to today and it is becoming a reality in some cities.

Waymo, the leader in the industry (owned by Google’s parent company) started offering driverless car rides in San Francisco in 2023. They offered 1 million rides total in 2023, that number ballooned to 5 million last year and has hit 10 million thus far in 2025, and we aren’t halfway through the year. And they are spending gobs of money on this as evidenced by the $5.6 billion of funding they secured at the end of 2024. They have expanded their reach recently to other cities including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, with Houston, Miami, San Antonio, and San Jose coming soon. While they have an early lead, there are many other companies who want a piece of the action. Tesla is launching its own driverless ride sharing service in Austin this month. Their stated goal is to catch up to Waymo. Amazon’s independent subsidiary Zoox is another company pouring billions into this endeavor. And there are others.

Wanting to experience this first-hand we did take a ride recently in a driverless car in San Francisco. It is surprisingly easy and akin to using Uber or Lyft. You simply download the free app, type in your destination and minutes later a sleek, white, Jaguar drives up next to you. It’s a normal looking car, nothing too out of the ordinary except maybe the spinning lidar sensor on the roof (there are also 29 cameras built-in to the car). The app lets you unlock the door, and you hop in, buckle up and a computer offers you a friendly greeting. Ours offered the advice that we were free to sing in the car as no one was listening. Oh, one other thing that wasn’t normal…there was a steering wheel but no one in the driver’s seat. The price of the ride was about the same as Uber or Lyft, but there was no one to tip, so the total outlay was slightly cheaper.

More obstacles await this becoming commonplace in cities like Toledo but the pace of adoption in the above-named cities has been astounding. A recent Wall Street Journal article opined that Waymo cars in San Francisco “started as a novelty but now are becoming normal”. Besides cost which doesn’t seem to be an issue for these companies and others like Amazon and Google, the issue has been all about safety. The early returns suggest that it is safer than human drivers by multitudes. Waymo now has a safety record of 50 million driverless miles…the equivalent of driving across America roughly 20,000 times. Unfortunately, there are millions of car crashes (with a driver at the wheel) each year that kill on average nearly 100 people per day. Proponents of driverless cars are keenly aware that by contrast just one severe car crash in a driverless car would halt momentum quickly. And perception would severely hinder this progress. But the safety measures of these systems seem to be far superior to the humans that get in cars every day.

A few concluding thoughts. In Swartz’s book, he notes that at the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors sponsored a “Futurama” exhibit called “Highways and Horizons”, which gave a glimpse of our future highway system that resembles reality today. As early as the 1920s radio controlled “driverless” cars were being tested. In some ways the idea of the driverless car has been around nearly as long as the automobile itself. And how about this, flying taxis are being tested and show promise! Significant progress has been made by a handful of companies like Joby Aviation that has established a presence in Dayton by construction of a large-scale manufacturing facility where they hope to produce over 500 air taxis and create 2000 jobs in the region. More on this in a future Optimist Corner.

Many forecasters and engineers think the day will come when human driving will be banned on some roads. It will be exciting to see what lies ahead, fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be a fun ride! (Sorry, we couldn’t help the bad pun)

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