PJ Vogt

The cities that threw their doors open to cars without regulation were rewarded with astonishing death rates.

Detroit let drivers pretty much run wild.

In the early 1900s, deaths accumulated in a Detroit without driver's licenses, stoplights, or turn signals.

Many of those deaths were children.

It took decades for society to mostly learn to live with cars.

The rest of the story is just the world you grew up in.

We invented laws, licenses, driver's ed.

We learned to better design roads.

We invented the highway, the seatbelt, the airbag.

All those things made driving less deadly, although the smartphone reversed some of that progress.

Nationally today, deaths from cars are about as common in America as deaths from guns or opioids.

About one in a hundred.

It'll probably happen to someone you know in your life.

Maybe several someones.

Whether or not you see that as an urgent problem to solve depends on you.

But as long as there have been cars, there have been people who wanted to truly solve what's left of the safety problem the best way we knew how.

They wanted to make the car more like the horse it replaced, make the car more sentient.

So that thought is there early, and early visions of it include, oh, well, we'll have radio-controlled cars because they had radios at the time.

There's a real effort at one point to build magnets under the road.

And at each stage, what a self-driving car can be is dictated by the technology that's available at the time, for the most part.