Technology and Culture

Implausible claims about the capabilities and technological maturity of safe, fast, and automated cars are neither new nor surprising, according to Peter Norton. He traces the rise and fall of these claims in the United States over nearly a century, arguing that they have never been true and, in fact, cannot be, since they are dishonest by design. This short book is a warning about the dangerous hype of self-driving cars, embedded in a broader argument about technology, capitalism, and marketing.

The bulk of the book examines four waves of revved-up excitement about the imminent arrival of high-tech motoring, labeling each of them "Futuramas" after the General Motors exhibits at the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs, which marked the high points of the first two eras. Both displayed dazzling models of cities rebuilt around smoothly flowing highways filled with cars that conveyed everyone in ease and comfort. He devotes more space to the latter two waves: the mostly abortive campaign for "Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems" or "smart highways" in the 1990s, and "Autonorama" itself, the recent promotion of AVs. (Norton argues that they are not "autonomous" but merely "automated vehicles," since "autonomous mobility," after all, is better known as walking.) Each era's prophets proclaimed a future of effortless driving and free-flowing traffic, always just a few years away. Their promises remained unfulfilled because—and this is Norton's central argument—they were intended not to be accurate, but to keep us hooked. Charles Kettering's plea to "keep the customer dissatisfied" on behalf of General Motors in 1929 and the business guru Clayton Christensen's paean to "disruption" at the century's end both entailed dangling an illusory ideal before customers in order to keep them chasing new products. Norton sees parallels to other profit-driven scams: "safer" tobacco, DDT, and opioids. He maintains that an AV that actually operated safely on a city street, braking for pedestrians and all other potential obstacles, would never be fast enough to entice consumers. He extends his analysis of their inherent failure into a fifth chapter on the fallacies of "data-driven" policies and their false claims of inevitable progress. Instead, they serve the interests of companies that stand to profit from keeping people in their cars longer while harvesting reams of data from them.

Two key premises underpin his analysis: car dependency and induced traffic (although he does not use the latter term, referring instead to the Jevons paradox). At every step, he explains, the tantalizing promise of automated mobility has reinforced a disastrous commitment to an ever more car-centered transportation system (an honorable exception being Walt Disney and his monorails), with all its attendant bloodshed, sprawl, and [End Page 1196] inconvenience. High-tech and data-driven "solutions" merely reinforce this dependency, and putative experts simply dismiss public transit as an alternative. Meanwhile, the decades-long failure to acknowledge the evidence that new roads encourage additional driving has promoted wasteful and never-ending investments in road expansion.

History and polemic are uneasy bedfellows, the latter demanding shortcuts and simplifications. Most notable in Autonorama is the absence of politics. Norton's previous book, Fighting Traffic, a detailed study of the first of these "Futuramas," has been remarkably influential among transit advocates. In it he revived a term that the emerging constellation of automotive interests coined for themselves in the 1920s, "motordom," and Fighting Traffic's influence has singlehandedly made the word an appealing label for the bad guys in the contemporary conversation about transportation policy. Here, Norton offers only a vague definition of "motordom" while identifying it as the driving force behind car-dependent sprawl across the entire century. Readers are expected to make the (plausible) assumption that "motordom" has long held sway over government. Politics does, however, crop up in his conclusion, where he appeals to it to save us from data-driven car dependency. But a polemic cannot stop to evaluate every assumption, and sometimes it offers hope...