PJ Vogt

A very good resolution, because of course, for most of us, driving is the riskiest behavior we routinely engage in.

In fact, even Alex, despite his good intentions, would actually get in a car accident just a few months after we first spoke.

He was okay.

It was the car that was totaled.

Safety is the entire pitch for the driverless car, which is really a car driven by a computer.

Driverless cars don't get drunk, tired, or distracted.

They never text or feel road rage.

And these driverless cars, they aren't the future.

They're actually already here.

But it's funny, if you just don't happen to live in a place that already has them, it's easy to not see how fast things are changing.

Robo-taxis like Waymo are operating in 10 American cities, providing millions of rides to Americans.

In China, the rollout is happening even more widely.

They're in twice as many cities.

But here, if you live in a place like San Francisco or Austin, today a driverless car is about as exotic as an Uber.

A passenger in those cities opens up their phone and decides who should drive them, a human driver or a robot driver.

How that happened is a story, a story we are living through right now, whose ending promises to totally reshape the places we live.

And today we're gonna tell you how we got here in chapters.

Chapter one, dreams without drivers.

So it turns out this dream that inventors have had to replace the human driver with some kind of machine, that dream is about as old as the lamplighters.

People have been thinking about a self-driving car for just about as long as there's been a human-driven car.