Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Self-driving cars: A tech miracle or a public safety threat?

white car

A self-driving car from Waymo and Jaguar moved through traffic in San Francisco in 2021.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

Will self-driving cars transform our transportation infrastructure? For several years we have been hearing that driverless vehicles will be taking over the streets, and that this transportation revolution will be a great thing for consumers as well as society.


Imagine, your own personal robot driver who picks you up and drops you off, 24/7. No more parking woes or falling asleep at the wheel. Leading companies like Tesla and Waymo have claimed that their robo cars are safer than human-driven vehicles. Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google/Alphabet, says its vehicles have logged more than 7 million practice miles on public roads, and also 20 billion miles in “simulation.”

That sounds like a lot until you realize that there are 243 million licensed drivers in the United States who drive on average about 13,500 miles a year. That’s a total of 3.3 trillion miles driven every year.

Will any of these driverless services ever live up to the Silicon Valley hype? It’s one thing to test-drive on a track or a computer simulation, but the chaos and confusion of streets in the real world have proven to be a greater challenge than the brash entrepreneurs at Waymo or Tesla’s Elon Musk will admit. Now that the companies are required to report all accidents, it turns out there have been a lot more of them than the public knew.

Recently Waymo became the target of a new federal investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Its investigators flagged nearly two dozen recent incidents when Waymo's vehicles were involved in a collision or exhibiting erratic behavior. There have been increasing reports of collisions with stationary objects, such as gates and parked vehicles, as well as violations of traffic laws.

Waymo’s main competitor, Cruise, paused operations entirely after numerous incidents of erratic operation. That includes an incident in San Francisco that resulted in a pedestrian being dragged 20 feet by a Cruise vehicle, even as Cruise withheld video of the incident from regulators.

Previously an Uber robo vehicle killed a pedestrian, and San Francisco’s fire chief warned that driverless cars interfered with emergency vehicles nearly 40 times in 2023 alone. In April, the NHTSA opened investigations into collisions involving self-driving vehicles run by Amazon-owned Zoox, as well as partially automated driver-assist systems from Tesla and Ford.

NHTSA has identified at least 13 Tesla crashes involving one or more deaths while drivers were using Autopilot, and many more involving serious injuries.

Many members of the public are not happy about this new danger on city streets. In San Francisco, an angry crowd set fire to a Waymo driverless taxi just days after a Waymo car hit a bicyclist. Previously, a Waymo vehicle had struck and killed a dog.

So it looks like industry hype is outracing reality. Part of the issue is one of “trust.” The motto of Silicon Valley has always been “move fast and break things” and “apologize later.” When that reckless attitude gets applied to robo cars, it’s fair to ask whether it is OK that these companies act as if our streets are their laboratory and we’re their guinea pigs.

I enjoy my smartphone and a few techno-trinkets as much as anyone, and certainly many new technologies can bring welcome benefits. But I remember back in 2017 when several tech companies and investors revealed their latest shiny object — flying cars. Uber announced that it would be piloting an aerial taxi service in Los Angeles by 2020. At the time Uber was losing billions of dollars because it used predatory pricing to subsidize each ride as a way to monopolize the market and drive out competitors (including public transportation).

Yet the media lapped it up, even though Uber didn’t even have a working prototype for a service where the equivalent of a fender-bender in the air would be death. Unsurprisingly, the Jetsons’ taxi never took off.

Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret is that seven out of 10 start-ups fail and nine of 10 never earn a profit. Silicon Valley is a casino where investors roll the dice. So the entrepreneurs often feel pressured to sound like circus impresario P.T. Barnum trying to over-hype their latest show.

Don’t get me wrong, the fact that these vehicles can self-drive at all is a marvel. And Waymo counters that 40,000 people are killed by human-driven vehicles every year. But that’s misleading because it’s spread across three trillion miles. How will society decide the threshold for when robo cars are deemed safer than humans?

Maybe these companies should have to create a test city in the desert and experiment there. Currently, the limited abilities of robo cars make them suitable for a Disney World ride, or as shuttles on a university campus or industrial park where the vehicle could safely drive the same repetitive route. Or perhaps they can be used as long distance delivery trucks, which would only have to drive straight on an interstate, and at the city limits a human could drive it into the city.

Instead, regulators mostly have been hands-off, with California recently allowing scandal-plagued Waymo to expand in Los Angeles. The Waymo-ification of our streets seems to be proceeding against all common sense, even as its actual benefits remain elusive.

Read More

Could Trump’s campaign against the media come back to bite conservatives?

US President Donald Trump reacts next to Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, after speaking at the public memorial service for right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21, 2025.

(Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Could Trump’s campaign against the media come back to bite conservatives?

In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’sapparently temporary— suspension from late-night TV, a (tragically small) number of prominent conservatives and Republicans have taken exception to the Trump administration’s comfort with “jawboning” critics into submission.

Sen. Ted Cruz condemned the administration’s “mafioso behavior.” He warned that “going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again — wins the White House … they will silence us.” Cruz added during his Friday podcast. “They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Congress Bill Spotlight: No Social Media at School Act

Rep. Angie Craig’s No Social Media at School Act would ban TikTok, Instagram & Snapchat during K-12 school hours. See what’s in the bill.

Getty Images, Daniel de la Hoz

Congress Bill Spotlight: No Social Media at School Act

Gen Z’s worst nightmare: TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat couldn’t be used during school hours.

What the bill does

Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN2) introduced the No Social Media at School Act, which would require social media companies to use “geofencing” to block access to their products on K-12 school grounds during school hours.

Keep ReadingShow less
On Live Facial Recognition in the City: We Are Not Guinea Pigs, and We Are Not Disposable

New Orleans fights a facial recognition ordinance as residents warn of privacy risks, mass surveillance, and threats to immigrant communities.

Getty Images, PhanuwatNandee

On Live Facial Recognition in the City: We Are Not Guinea Pigs, and We Are Not Disposable

Every day, I ride my bike down my block in Milan, a tight-knit residential neighborhood in central New Orleans. And every day, a surveillance camera follows me down the block.

Despite the rosy rhetoric of pro-surveillance politicians and facial recognition vendors, that camera doesn’t make me safer. In fact, it puts everyone in New Orleans at risk.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Manosphere Is Bad for Boys and Worse for Democracy
a skeleton sitting at a desk with a laptop and keyboard
Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

The Manosphere Is Bad for Boys and Worse for Democracy

15-year-old Owen Cooper made history to become the youngest male to win an Emmy Award. In the Netflix series Adolescence, Owen plays the role of a 13-year-old schoolboy who is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school. As we follow the events leading up to the crime, the award-winning series forces us to confront legitimate insecurities that many teenage boys face, from lack of physical prowess to emotional disconnection from their fathers. It also exposes how easily young men, seeking comfort in their computers, can be pulled into online spaces that normalize misogyny and rage; a pipeline enabled by a failure of tech policy.

At the center of this danger lies the manosphere: a global network of influencers whose words can radicalize young men and channel their frustrations into violence. But this is more than a social crisis affecting some young men. It is a growing threat to the democratic values of equality and tolerance that keep us all safe.

Keep ReadingShow less