Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving

by Jason Torchinsky Narrated by Roger Wayne

Overview

Self-driving cars sound fantastical and futuristic and yet they'll soon be on every street in America. Whether it's Tesla's Autopilot, Google's Waymo, Mercedes's Distronic, or Uber's modified Volvos, companies around the world are developing autonomous cars. But why? And what will they mean for the auto industry and humanity at large?



In Robot, Take the Wheel, famed automotive expert Jason Torchinsky gives a colorful account of the development of autonomous vehicles and their likely implications. Torchinsky encourages us to think of self-driving cars as an entirely new machine, something beyond cars as we understand them today. He considers how humans will get along with these robots that will take over our cars' jobs, what they will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what we can expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can trick them and have fun with them, and how we can make sure there's still a place for those of us who love to drive, especially with a manual transmission.



This vibrant volume brims with insider information. It explores what's ahead and considers what we can do now to shape the automated future.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

One of my favorite guests on the Tonight Show was an astronaut named Story Musgrave. Although not as famous as Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, Story was not only an astronaut, he was also a physicist, an academic, and a philosopher. He could translate space travel into words and pictures that people could really understand. I like to think of Jason as my automotive astronaut, able to take his experiences and really make the reader feel like they are riding along with him. Jason is a unique blend of dork, car guy, and intellectual all rolled into one.” —Jay Leno, host of Jay Leno’s Garage and former host of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno

“Everything you wanted to know about autonomous vehicles but were afraid to ask. This delightfully written book by the longtime Jalopnik contributor is an essential guide to how driverless vehicles work—and how they have the potential to dramatically reshape society.” —Curbed

“An interesting and light hearted look at what the future of autonomous vehicles might be like.” —The Gearhead Project

“As car manufacturers and other companies race to develop autonomous vehicles, the need for a sherpa in the potential robot uprising is more pressing than ever. Torchinsky is that sherpa.” —Book & Film Globe

“Robot, Take The Wheel is an entertaining yet serious examination of what automation is and how it applies to our favorite pastime: driving.” —Automoblog

“It’s a great book. I encourage you to check it out.” —In Wheel Time

“Jason Torchinsky’s Robot, Take the Wheel tops our list of must-read books for anyone interested in autonomous vehicles.” —Ground Truth podcast

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173924230
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

This book is about the coming age of autonomous cars and is an attempt to get you to consider them as something beyond cars as we understand them today. It’s not a book about the details of the technology, because that changes so fast and so many people so much smarter than me can write those books. This book is essentially a giant thought experiment, where we’ll try and imagine what the coming of autonomous vehicles means to us, how we’ll get along with the robots that will take over our cars’ jobs, what these things will look like, what sorts of jobs they may do, what can we expect of them, how they should act, ethically, how we can have fun with them, and how those of us who love to drive, manually and laboriously, can continue to do so.

It’s probably worth pointing out just what sort of a book this will be. If you’re looking for something crammed full of the latest facts, statistics, and research about autonomous cars and their development and up-to-the-minute information about the current state-of-the art cars, this isn’t that book. If you want that, look on the internet. It gets updated far more often than books do, and you’ll be much happier. I don’t want to compete with the internet for anything like that, because I’ll lose.

This book also doesn’t reach out to too many experts, despite how often PR people and agents for these experts like to email me. I’m not ignoring the experts in the field out of any disrespect, but the truth is that the full impact of autonomous cars isn’t even close to being felt. Even if an expert has more degrees than a thermometer, and despite however closely they’re working with this or that autonomous car start-up with acres of venture capital funding, they’re going to be pulling guesses ex recto, just like I am. So I’m just going to give it a go myself, because why not?

Think about this book like that—some guy, we’ll call him “me,” is interested in cars and robots and the culture around both, and is thinking a lot about it and asking a lot of questions, not all of which he has answers to or can even pretend he has answers to.

Because I don’t. But the questions are still worth asking, and it’s still worth thinking about how things could be, how we want them to be, and how we’re afraid they may end up. This is a conversation about what autonomous cars may be or mean or become, and if you’re reading this from some point in the future, laughing about how wrong I was about everything, I can’t say I’ll be too shocked.

This is an exciting era we’re in. Autonomy will be the biggest shift in how we interact with our cars in decades, and it’s going to reshape how we transport ourselves more than any other advancement in recent memory. It’s going to end up far, far weirder than we think, I’m pretty sure, so we may as well get a head start and think some things through.

Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.

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