Drivers and Stick Shifts - When Will Everything Be Phased Out?

Autonomous vehicles and shared mobility are invoked in our contemporary discourse as an inevitable fate. There is an unsettling undercurrent rippling around a not altogether desirable future for the automobile as we know it. I am not anti-progress, anti-technology, or otherwise prone to romanticizing yesteryear. I welcome the convenience and safety of new technologies and look forward to the day I can work during my freeway commute. However, the pleasure and freedom I occasionally indulge — “shifting and drifting” in the words of Canadian rock band Rush — appears increasingly at risk.

How many years are left before we’re no longer able to sit at the left front corner of our cars, row through the gears, and take ourselves on whatever path of discovery we please.

How many self-driven years remain?

TomM - 2/25/2016 4:58:06 PM

+6 Boost

As long as Manufacturers need someone to BUY their motor vehicles - Drivers will continue to exist. We already have vehicles that do not require input from the passengers - they are called TAXIs or Cabs or Trains or Buses or Planes. Yet - ALL of them require drivers (even the Trains are not fully automated yet)

As far as EVERYTHING being phased out - are you talking about the end of the world? To date - lots of people have predicted that to happen on even specific dates - and it has yet to happen I think. Of course - Donald Trump is ahead for the Republican Presidential Nomination - so maybe the world is ready to end!

PUGPROUD - 2/25/2016 6:22:13 PM

+1 Boost

Like Charleston Heston they will take the stick shift from my cold dead hand. Autonomous driving will take off when ethical issues are resolved and responsibility for damages can be specifically assigned to either the car manufacturer or the owner. Volvo has announced that it will self insure its autonomously driven cars. If other manufacturers follow suit it might not be too long before self driving cars are the norm. Though the details and fine print are far from being clear today.

MDarringer - 2/25/2016 8:34:01 PM

+2 Boost

In the year 2525...

SanJoseDriver - 2/26/2016 1:35:49 AM

+1 Boost

We'll have door-to-door autonomous cars around 2020. I give it until 2030 for autonomous features to be federally mandated like airbags. By 2050, I doubt anyone will be driving except on the race track.