♪♪ this year marks the 20th anniversary of the september 11th attacks. join us for live coverage from new york, the pentagon, and shanksville, pensence, starting at 5:00 a.m. eastern. watch on line or linen the c-span radio app. up next on american history tv, historian dan albert talks about his book "are we there yet, the american automobile, past, present, and driverless, if which he chronicles the history of the u.s. auto industry and argues against driverless cars. the smithsonian hosted this

event in 2019. >> tonight we are joined by historian and automotive journalist dan albert. dan has spent a career writing and teaching about the history and culture of technology. his articles can be found in n plus one magazine, popular science, and the journal for the history of behavioral science. he holds a ph.d. in history from the university of michigan where he also taught in the college of engineering. dan also served as the curator of vehicle collections at the national museum of science and industry in london. he is thor thou of "are we there yet". it is available for sale and signing at the conclusion of the program. please, without further ado, join me in welcoming him this evening. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. >> thank you. >> that was really lovely.

thank you amanda. really generous and sweet introduction. i thank everybody for being here. otherwise i would be up here by myself. i especially -- you know, amanda told me that smithsonian associates people have reminded me how engaged these audiences are that come for these events so i feel like i have to be up on my toes and really give you my "a" game to take this seriously and to be a little intellectual, be a little heavy, if you will, talking about the past, present, and future of the automobile. there is a lot of material in the book. look at that. it's right there. everything from teaching my daughter to drive to a freudian analysis of henry ford. but i can't obviously capture all of that tonight. so what i thought i would do is try to talk about the early

period of the automobile, and a little bit of the theory about how one understands that. and the reason i am doing that is to put us in the present moment where, as some of you may have heard, driverless cars are on the horizon. but at the end of the day, i really want to talk about cars. i am both a lover and a hater of cars for a variety of reasons. and i am looking forward to hearing from you about your experiences with the automobile. so without further ado, let's get started with cars. yeah, well, i mean, i had to show you this. how many people know this machine and have gone to see it? yeah. how many -- keep your hands up if you stayed and listened to the entire sound track. a couple. how many of you went to the gift shop afterwards and bought the

vinyl record and brought it home and played it non-stop. hey -- oh, well. these two. i know them. pretty much me. as long as we are raising hands, can i -- i did a thing in brooklyn. we were going on about cars. you know, and then i realized halfway through it, i said, how many of you like own a car? drive? i think three. so can i get a quick show of hands. how many of you own a toyota? how many of you own a mercedes? how many of you own an american car? how many of you don't own a car at all? or rarely -- i will add this, rarely drive. okay. interesting, diverse audience. that's exciting. yeah, we are not going to talk very much about trains. we are going to talk about cars. and this is the museum of history and technology, national museum of american history, as

it was back in 1974. that's sort of me. you know, just enthralled. i grew up in colliesville. we would come all the time. any time a guest from out of town, relatives or whatever, go to the museum. maybe the castle building and see the airplanes but mostly go to the museum of history and technology because what else is there -- i hear there are some, you know, art museums, but i don't know about them. that's sort of me. it's not actually me. i was much fatter back then. but this is a stock photo from the smith sownial collections. i want you to -- smithsonian collections. i want you to get a sense of it. i want to talk about how that exhibition changed and what it tells us about how we think about technology. the hard part, as we face the prospect of driverless cars is understanding the process by

which they are coming to us, or coming upon us or invoking them. so when we look at this, the first thought is well, that's like an encyclopedia, right? it's not really saying anything about how technology developed. it's got a collection of objects. the labels typically say this guy invented it in this year. it had this performance characteristic. very straightforward. as you begin -- that's the way i experienced it as a kid. but as i studied further and further and as i thought about different ways of understanding technology, i realized that this is actually got an implicit story behind it. and that story is of technological evolution or sometimes called technological determinism. technologies are invented. machines are invented. and they kind of ping-pong their way through our lives and change them. right? gooden bergin vents the printing

press. people learn to read. iphones invented, i don't know what happened to us. but that we don't think about the other way of doing things. and that's very much our lived experience. right? a sec following shows up, we bring it. we don't really think about the story behind it. but that's also reinforced here. this museum exhibition opened in 1964. we are in the cold war. there is just an implicit understanding that technology is important, that technology advances becomes more efficient over time, bigger cars, faster cars. and i just want to show you quickly -- i hope you can see things clearly enough here. c-span is making things bright. now i can see a little better. if you look back on the back wall, you can see there is a high wheeler just poking out from behind there. an old-fashioned bicycle, before the bike chain is invented.

then we work our way from the right to the left to ever more modern bicycles. they get better, get berks they get better. you can see hopefully in the far left corner all the way in the back. horse and wagon. horse and wagon, more advanced car, more advanced car, even -- you can see gas pumps there, from a very early one to a later one. and of course the centerpiece, the race car, right? the pinnacle of automotive capability, right? that's the ultimate machine. but we don't know, like, much about what was it like to drive it or where was it born? where did it live? how did people experience it? did people go to the races? was it just something that, you know, happened on the side? so in 2009 i think it is, infers the america on the move exhibit. this is the general motors

transportation hall. a couple of things that happened. the railroad -- the 1401 is in that hall because they are never moving that train again. all right? gorgeous train isn't it? do you want to go back and look at it? no. but also, there is an intention and a purpose in putting trains and even bicycles and other vehicles all together. and that is to stop thinking about them and stop organizing them in terms of technical differences. you know, there is no point in putting a four cylinder engine over here and a six cylinder engine over there and a -- that's not the point. the point is, how do we use them? so we look for example, at this. i believe -- i meant to get over there today but i believe that's about a '55. someone can correct me later. i think that's a '55 country squire wagon. it oozes domest testy. the wooden pamming. calls forward a history when

cars had wooden bodies. white wall tires. it is beautiful. but what else is there? people. context. i wonder if they are even moving. the kid looks unhappy here. you also have a girl with a bicycle. what is a bicycle about? aculturating to the rules of the road, learning to be a road user. learning in a sense to drive. by the same token if you look up at the red car. what is that? that's a kiddie car. it tells me two things. kids like toy cars. no debating it. in many ways it is children rehearsing what their parents do. toy kitchen. highway car. you learn how to be an adult. that was very much part of american society and culture. that's the way that automobile fits into our society.

there is loads of these mannequins in the exhibition. again, old school. this is a 1950 buick. again, somebody can correct me. i haven't been over there. i'm pretty sure. you can tell by the grill. these grills are gorgeous. the three holes on the side up there. you can see those are classic buick symbols. you will even notice here -- they don't even do anything, but you will even notice them on modern buicks. notice how far in the wheels are set and how far out the vehicle body comes over those vehicles. in an evident to make it look heavier. this is a vehicle with very low pressure tires and you just float along. you undulate along. right? it is a magic carpet in a lot of ways. the problem is of course you have to go to a car dealer to buy it. and i feel terrible for these

poor people here. they are in for eternity going to be negotiating with a car salesman. and i hope -- any car salesmen here? one of the most disruptive things about tesla is they have been able to avoid car dealerships. i don't want to say -- there is actually an interesting history about car dealers and mechanics and our trust of them. but leaving that aside, it is actually a very inconvenient and very not -- sort of 20th century way to buy something. we don't -- you touch -- you have a thought, you touch your phone, the thing arrives. right? why doesn't that happen with cars? some companies are trying to do that. for me, god forbid i should see a lamborghini, touch my phone

and next thing you know, amazon drops a box. but for the car dealerships, that's why they want to get. that purchase process is really a knot in the system. it is a problem for the consumption the automobile and industry. that's the way i want to frame this. i don't want to look so much at the buick although obviously i want to look at it a lot. but i don't want to understand so much the buick except in the context of what it meant for people and how it interacted with people's lives. you know, how did the family use it? what was it like when you taught your daughter or your son to drive in the buick? what was their first experience with it? what was it look to have three on the tree, and a double clutch? all of those thing. what was it like to buy it? what was it like to get it

fixed? what was it like when it finally died? was it sad and all of those thing. that goes to the way we think about the process of innovation and the process of invention. again, you think about driverless cars. okay, they are being invented. but in fact, they have been invented many times. by the same token, i will show you the automobile has been invented many times in history. if i asked you off the top of your heads, when would you say the automobile was invented in i will give you a couple -- 1900? 1910? 1898? very specific years. do you want the give me a month? >> july. >> there you go. there you go. yeah. i am going to prove you all wrong. anyway, so the question is not so much birth. it's adoption. okay? because it's born many times.

it is often still born. i will show you how that happened. so the real questions i have are two. one, not why was it invented? but why was it adopted? why did the invention succeed when it did? also, what was it really? we kinds of think, automobile, you know, you get in a car, you go, it's a machine for getting places, a transportation device. and obviously, you know, in the driverless car people think about it that's what they think about it. they are not talking about tail fins. they are not talking about how it's going to sit in your driveway for your kids to learn what it is like to be around an automobile. that's kind of a strange question. but what is an automobile? okay? by the same token i think you will be surprised perhaps to learn that driverless cars have been invented many times. thought about and technology described in the '30s. tested in the 1950s. and proven quite viable by government testing in the 1990s.

we had them, why didn't we pursue them? as we look deeply, we can say oh, those were driverless cars, but they were very different than the driverless cars that are coming next. we will look a little bit about what those driverless cars were like and what the driverless cars are like today. you were all wrong. the automobile was invented in 1672. all right? this guy is verbist. he was a jesuit monk. he was a missionary of went to china. went there to turn the emperor into a christian, tried to convince him -- you know, bring him to christianity. he got a car to bring him to christianity. he made this car. it is cool. you can see there there is a

haul, a hose, right, and a fire right below it. very simple. very straightforward. steam driven out of it. spins a turbine. turbine drives a couple of wooden gears, wheels go, and off you go. the big wheel in the back here is -- is for steering. and i don't quite see how that works from the drawing. but i'm sure they had it figured out. this was actually only big enough to carry a rat. but the question is not, you know, okay, so there it was. it didn't work very well. maybe. we don't really know. but so what? why didn't somebody look at and it go, that's a good start. let's do that some more? imagine if over the last 400 and something years the chinese decided to pursue rat cars. we would have pretty good rat

cars. we would have cars that carried lots of rats. really, we see that it was invented. and we can't quite say that it didn't work. but we can say it wasn't adopted. this is a fascinating one. this is 1790, a guy named natan reed. he pattened a steam-powered self propelled road vehicle. a car. at the time, there was no u.s. patent office, which is hilarious. i think actually on the patent is george washington's signature. the patent office hadn't been invented yet. he had this idea, he got a patent, what did he do with it? he didn't start selling steam carriages in 1790. no capital available. no interest. let's look at a couple of others. this is another one of my favorites. i call this the first amphibious car. oliver evans. very accomplished engineer. he did a lot with process

innovation in flour mills in making flour, bread mills, if you will. he was building for the city of philadelphia a harbor dredge, a boat a scowl that goes out and addition out the mud so that boats can get through. he was also 13wrd, once he had this lightweight good steam engine in collecting capital or attracting capital for a car business. rather than getting guys in a wagon to drag the things down to the water he said i am going to put wheels on and it show it off. that's exactly what he did. maybe we will call that the first amphibious car. i don't know. 1805, though. no cars yet. okay? this is one of my favorites. i will show it to you in a second in another version. this is 1853. dujon esteem wagon. two things are interesting about it. this is 1853. that car burned in a fire but i

will show you in a minute a later one. the boiler sat in the middle. people sat on either side. it was essentially like a mini bus. he ran a very successful business running people out to long island from new york city. did about 30 miles an hour. for comparison, you know, a ford model t came out around 1909, 1908, it did about 40. topped out at 40. perfectly fast. perfectly viable. not picked up. also, his reason for developing the car has nothing to do with what you might think it is. it is not about transportation per se. he said he wanted to end the fearful misery of horses. this is something that's developing in this period, the sort of aspca sensibility towards animals, think of them not as machines to be abused,

but as creatures. just quickly, here's another version of it. this is 1866. i show it to you because it's in the smithsonian collection. right? it is not on display. where are the curators? it should be on display. it's just a great machine to look at. it really does tell us something about road transport. and i understand. i was a curator. it's not easy. now, here's my most interesting one. this is also in the collection. it is a little model -- it is a patent model. at different times in history you had no produce not just a drawing but a physical model of your machine. 1879, this is patented by a guy named george seldon. a patent attorney up in new york, i think rochester. he was very smart. it is a lightweight -- it

describes everything that we think about about the early automobiles. lightweight, a hydrocarbon explosion engine, in other words an internal combustion engine, gasoline engine. able to deal with any reasonable incline, all kinds of other basic details we just think of as a car. 1879, the vehicle is not produced. because -- very smart patent attorney -- he kept filing amendments. there is different ways you can extent -- any pat patent attorneys in the room? you can kinds of extend. you are locked in because you have patent pending. you can do all sorts of various things to make sure the patent doesn't get issued. he waits until 1895. in 1895 the automobile arrives. automobile had been born for hundreds of years and certainly was viable by the 1870s but, et cetera not until the 1890s that

it's getting picked up. so here we are about 1900. i am going to digress for a second because i know people want to know about electric cars. and also -- oh, how many of you drive an electric car or own an electric car? one, two -- okay. tesla? volt? tesla? uh-huh. okay. so one of the big questions people always ask is, why do we get gasoline cars and not electric cars? you could ask the same question about steam cars. if you look up at the top there, there were about 4,000 vehicles in the country in 1900. as you can see, steam and electric outpaced the internal some bugs car. the early historians look at that and say, well, the internal combustion car is better. but you have to ask yourself a

more complicated question, what do we mean by better? is a gold fish better than a pigeon? i don't know. pigeon can't fly, but a gold fish -- wait, i got that backwards. pigeon can't swim. gold fish can't fly s. a gold fish better than a pigeon? right? opinion. in fact, the electric vehicle had a very good business model and was very viable for urban transportation, which is where the early automobiles were, and was also cleaner, quieter, more sensible. they would be glassed in at a time when gasoline automobiles couldn't really have glass. they shook and they were -- the glass would just crack and so forth. the other thing is that the electric car had a business model that's very different than the business model we think of over the last 100 years of,

okay, we will sell cars to people. and we will make our money. we will build more cars. the electric vehicle company developed, and i want you to think about uber or lyft. that's what they were. so in 1899, they had a fleet of hundreds of tai cabs, most of them in new york city. you could basically a taxi ride. you could rent the vehicle for a week or month. you could buy the vehicle. they were relatively expensive but you could buy one. what they found was they had a hard time providing taxi service because so many people were leasing them or holding them for long periods of time. it was a viable business. but what killed it? there is a couple of things culturally i will talk about in a minute. but in terms of going concern in terms of a business, one of the things that killed it was an

attack on monopoly. if you recall your history, theodore roosevelt, the trust buster. this is 1890s, turn of the century. trusts are a bad thing. standard oil and so forth. and in particular, a guy at horseless age who was a big supporter of the gasoline automobile referred to then as the wled cab trust. they were rapidly expanding. in fairness, just like uber or lyft, you do need to have a monopoly, you need to have a large enough network. because what good is it if you only have three lyfts and you want a ride? forget about it. you have to have lots of them. in that sense it was true. they really wanted to provide a service. they weren't interested in selling you a vehicle. they were interested in elg you a ride. okay? it worked. so what killed them in terms of business? they expanded -- this may sound

familiar. they expanded rapidly. they kept increasing their capitalization. then they got into a bit of a scandal where they had done a fraudulent loan and the stock price went and enron kind of a thing. okay. let me talk now about what the automobile is when we get to the mid 1890s, 1893. okay. we can talk about what's the first automobile. there is a bunch of other ones. i took out an electric car because it was u know, complicated. but i will just show you two of them here. 1893, also in the museum's collection. that's the do you rememberier motor wagon, brothers. springfield. massachusetts. they had a real winning car. they lightweight, very straightforward. there is a tiller to steer, a stick. they won races and they were

very durable. they did hill climbs, long distance runs. okay? so good car. stanley steamers, those are not the lewden cough drop guys. those are the stanley twins. and they between 1905 -- maybe a little earlier, '03 to '07 sold about 2,000 of those vehicles n. 1897, they sold 200. it was very viable machine. it accelerated easily. it was quiet and all of these things. so popular car. the problem is, those were not the first cars that really captured the attention of the people who could afford cars. the people who could afford cars were the rothchilds, the vander bilts, the top ten of the 1%. what they did -- you think of them as americans but they intermarried with europeans and

they would cruise back and forth to europe on the liners. and meanwhile n fans -- there is 1893. let's look at this peugeot up on the. to notice -- i hope you can see them here. it's got lights. it has little gas lamps. that's a real car. in fact, they were producing them. and they were selling them. a place for your lunch basket right there. right? so this is not just like a little try cycle or a bicycle, a four-wheel bicycle. this is a serious car, in 1893. the french eat this up. but they don't eat it up in the sense of transportation. these are rich man's toys. young men especially who have inherited wealth. this -- i'm sorry. that's not the peugeot. that's the dionne lawsuiton. my text -- dionne luton.

my text got mixed up. this is the french. notice these vehicles have the motor located under the seat. this vehicle has the motor out here. seems simple enough. but as a motor gets bigger, there is no place for it back here. this becomes called the system pannard. this is why engines are out in front. once they are out in front they can get bigger and bigger and bigger. so this really creates the modern architecture, you will, of the automobile. cars can get bigger -- engines can get bigger. and also, these were powerful. and they were fast. and they were fun. okay? again, i think we've got some lights. we have got a little more luxury. but mostly we have a lot more

power. we have a quote this is the "new york times." france has fade the most attention, yet though late in beginning, very american pride, though late in beginning we will make up lost ground. and then we will lead the world as we do in this and about all other things. we're number one, right? the other one i love is from the same article. this is reviewing the 1900 automobile show. the reporter from the "new york times" says fortunately none of these cars in america which adopted that important freak, the wheel. they are still excited about the tiller. meanwhile, over there they have got steering wheels. it is not as simple as tiller versus steering wheel. it has to do with something called the ackerman steering system. it really is a major fans, engineering advance. all right. let me keep moving. so a lot of things about the

automobile that i could talk about, why it comes in in the 1890s. it has to do with demographics, a rise in immigration, particularly immigration from places like southern italy where you have a bunch of catholics coming in and jews coming in from eastern europe and so forth. not the good americans from the early 19th century but smarmy immigrants that seem not so nice to hang around. so you begin to get these wreltier -- i say that in the context of how the wasps, native born considered them back then. this is not commentary from me. but there is an toefrtd get out of the city. the city is also becoming more congested. industrialization is happening. you have this throng of new people. so the idea of getting out of the city is a new and exciting thing. and the automobile is going to let you do it, partly, though, before the automobile there was the electrification of the street car. well into 1850s, cities were basically as big as you could

walk across, a couple of miles, in about a half an hour, you could walk a radius. with the electric street car, that begins to expand. and then the idea is the automobile will come and fill that. but i am going to focus on one -- one of the many elements. that's the bicycle. now we think of the bicycle and the automobile as enemies. certainly they are. anybody that rides a bike on the streets knows. but in a lot of ways, the bicycle established the car culture. huge bike craze in the 1890s. you can't even begin to imagine bike races got huge crowds, bicycle fashion, bicycle advertising. you know, you are playing cards, right w the bicycle on the back. that's from that period. that's what it's about. just to show you a couple examples. this i love of. this is a very sociable bicycle.

there are a couple of different ones. you can't see it here but i don't think she even has a wheel under there. i think it is kind of like a side car kind of balanced. i have to look into that. but you are going to take a day, take the wife, you want to have her there. none of this -- like anybody has ridden a tandem, you are always like this, what, what? and they get nothing -- no view. right? this is a guy named major taylor. there is a new book out about him. very interesting guy, number one racer in the country. obviously, african-american, at a time when african-americans racing against whites wasn't typically done. so the fact that he made a career in the business is incredible. on the other hand, when they would travel he had to go to certain hotels and so forth. here's what i want to touch on

real quickly. there were a lot of these women's clubs, women's biking clubs. they were part of sort of suffragettes and women's empowerment in the period. one thing you will notice is they are wearing long skirts. anybody biked with a long skirt? even with your pant cuffs, i am always stuffing it into my sock. right in you have got to the do this unless you have one of those straps and then you get to the office and then somebody at lunch finally points it out to you. jesus. but this doesn't work. what do they do? let's see if we can tell you what they do. let's see. yeah. bloomers. women start wearing bloomers. oh, my god, look, you can see their ankles. you should cover that up. right? this is a pretty big deal. people have moral panics with these kinds of things. rock and roll oh, my god.

they have a moral panic about bloomers, a moral panic about women being on bicycles. women out by themselves on bicycles. so you can see this, gives you the context. back in the day. now you get baseball cards and gum -- i don't know if they give you the gum anymore. but cigarette packs, cigar packs would come with a card and people would collect them. let's look at what this one has. way up in the corner here you can see a lady on a bicycle. obviously, this lady's got a bicycle. but then look at all these legs showing. right? even some over there. i mean, wow. so what are they saying? well, if women are going to start dressing like that, what's next? they are going to start smoking cigars. can you imagine women smoking

cigars? that manly thing. they are turning into men? there is this moral pan i go. but there is also this period of women's empowerment. let me show you a little bit more about the bicycle culture and connect to it the car culture. you know, that's about the sex appeal. but it's also about empowerment. i think i have another slide i am going to show you. danger in speed. here are bikes that are not your typical with the chain and everything. these are called high wheelers, a penny far thing if you are in england. the bigger the wheel, the faster you go. dynamics, you pedal here, the big wheel -- the higher the wheel, the faster you go, by the time you are five feet in the air you are going fast. they referred to them as scorchers, speeders, racing through town. now, that's on a track. so that's okay.

1901. speed and danger. this is henry ford racing alexander wynton. the idea that henry ford, who is pretty much a failed businessman at this point beat the best racer with the biggest car in the country was a huge deal. wynton's car kind of sputtered in the race, and he lost, but people went wild. i love this line, one man threw his hat up in the air and when it came down he stomped on it, and another man was so excited, i wanted to see this thing, and so excited that he hit his wife on the head to keep her from flying off of the handle. and that description and you know that thing with the egg, you know. another cyclist, and this is barney oldfield. a celebrity cyclist. much like major taylor. henry ford got him to do his

next racer. this is a year later, this is a racer called the 992, just a year later. and this thing is insane, and he is sitting in what is amounts to the drawing room seat. they probably just pulled it off, and the leg is off, and took it out of cholera ford's broom and put it on there. and he's steering with a flat bar with two handles on it. the engine is huge. sucked in like five gallons of air with every stroke. you know, huge amounts of air and huge amounts of horsepower, did 90 miles per hour, and no seat belt and no airbags, and there is, you know, no dashboard and the crank case is open for those of you who want to be car guys and the crank case is down at the bottom and drenched in oil, and the oil just sprayed everywhere. it is nuts.

this was ford 678 he was like -- this was ford. he was like, we are going to make it as light as possible. here is the beauty of it. he had no idea how to drive. they just said, hey, you are a bike racer, and yeah, i'll try it. part of the reason that there is this instead of this is, you know, the steering wheel, and he didn't know. that is all very funny. people rushed out to races in 1896, and cosmopolitan ran the race in new york. the crowd was so thick that the police had to come. people loved it. what they didn't love is when the rich folks started to tearing through the cities and killing children and basically colonizing the streets and driving people out of the way. you can see here the policemen are even dodging, dodging the roads. this is by the way called the crusade, is it? the crusade of the 500 or the charge of the -- the charge of the 400. so back in the day, there was a

socialite list, the actors and everybody was listed on it. so that is, that is the joke there. and this fellow, willie vanderbilt ii, willie k. vanderbilt ii was the most notorious of the guys, and the ones who got into this is the young man of inherited wealth, scion, and they had wealth and they did not need any money, and vanderbilt told him that they told the reporter that maybe he was the analyst. he said, well, wealth is a certain death to ambition as cocaine is to mortality. he had nothing to excitement him, and so the auto wheel shows up, and off he goes. there is an interesting op-ed, and vanderbilt wanted to build, and some of his buddies wanted to build a raceway on long

island, private raceway. you know, no other cars and no other people on it, and the times he editorialized and they said they don't want that because the # fun of it is to see how close they can get to pedestrians without killing them. and now we try to deal with the problem, the problem in the city. we begin to try to control the chaos of traffic. excale or theo is one of the latin phrases for a traffic engineer. order from chaos. hopefully we can get order from chaos. hopefully we can get this to work. it is 1906, four days before the san francisco earthquake. a company that did these films, guys on the front of the street

car, cable car, cranking away on the camera. you will see people turn and look at them because it is a pretty amazing thing. riding down market street watching the traffic. what i want to you do is look at the traffic. let me add there is no sound in the original. but film historians thought it would be nice, and they did a simple threatic and thoughtful job of adding sounds. so you do get -- sympathetic and thoughtful job of adding sounds. so you do get a sense the sound. we will see a few minutes of it you can just see them running right down the track.

we will just go a little further. okay. that will be our stop. it's funny, just quickly, you see a bunch of cars in there.

i have looked at it closely, they are the same cars. you can see, there is license tags. so i am pretty sure he hired these cars to drive through. there were not that many cars in san francisco at the there were not that many cars in san francisco at the time but it gives you a sense as motor vehicles come in. they're ail little bit faster, a little crazier, they weave in and out. there's no rules of the road. it's chaos. it does work. i mean, there's certainly accidents. people are certainly runned down by street cars, stomped on or kicked by horses but it does work. it's a functional space, and it's a multifunctional space. you'll see not on market street, et cetera aa big boulevard but lots of streets kids playing, push carts. the street is a multifunctional space. over time, though, as the automobile comes in, there's a concern -- sorry, one sec, yeah. there develops a concern about

traffic crashes. this starts very early but i'm going to jump ahead for just a second here, because 1935 is very much a pivotal year for a couple of reasons. one is there is a spike in automobile traffic deaths and if you look at public health graph, you see the number of deaths per million miles traveled is just keeps going up and really spikes in the middle of the depression. also, though, there was an article came out in 1935, it essentially said you're saving a few minutes and risking your life. in other words, slow down, drive carefully. what was different -- which of course, right? you've heard that, told that. what was different was nobody had done a full-on blood and gore story. he talks about skin. he visits actual accidents right after they've happened.

he talks about bones sticking out. he talks about a woman's face just so full of blood that all you can see is this kind of hole in the middle of it where a mouth is. really, you know, gruesome stuff, and that was in order to shock people out of the complacency of hearing about death statistics and so forth and it does have an impact. it does not make people drive safer but it makes people go oh, my god. more panic. gallup polls say people want more policing of drivers. they don't mean them. they mean the bad drivers. right in this period it's interesting, 1935, aaa comes out with derived ed pamphlets. 1936 the insurance comes out with the first drivers ed teex books and they make heroes of traffic police and the group called the traffic psychologists and i'll touch on them.

actually psycho technologists. and this is the 1930s, we're in a period where eugenical thinking is considered science, we're in a period where science generally is sort of on the ascendant the expectation science can solve problems. i'll talk about fixing the driver, fixing the road and fixing the car but mostly leave fixing the car out of the picture. for those of you that are familiar with it, ralph nader wasn't just a presidential candidate. he wrote "unsafe at any speed" and from the 1960s, we got seat belts, air bags, all of the things that we now live with in this kind of automotive cocoon that we drive. in the 1930s following publication of "and sudden death" it was called the auto

industry did get involved at least in the rhetoric of driver safety and advertise their vehicles, the safety components, so they would say we have better brakes. turtle top, a safer roof so it won't crush when you roll over. so you know, and the auto companies were american auto companies were terrible. gm was the worst, lead gas, safety glass, seat belts, air bags, every turn, we can talk about that if you want but there really was in the 1930s research into crash survival, and some of that research made its way particularly the studebaker, a guy named paul hoffman, but he turned that over to something called the automotive safety foundation. that's different than the 1960s solution. what are we going to do to fix the driver? 1903 on the right, the first set

of traffic in new york city, william phelps, a little beard and very patrician. he recalled in 1867 getting caught in a blockade so this is just horses and wagons. he was a very wealthy decide, another scion of a rich family. never drove. this was before automobiles but he did not like the chaos of the streets that you just saw. this blockade, when he was a child at the time, wait, there's only 12 wagons here. this is nuts. we must be able to do something. as he got older in 1903, he convinced the police department to institute a set of rules and there it is. they posted these plaquards, and things that we take for granted, stay to the right, turning left, the other car has the right of way, those kinds of things. that spreads various state and local agents come together, particularly in the 1920s and

begin to create a uniform code, driving from mississippi to alabama and the rules change. this is fascinating to me, you come to an intersection, there's a traffic light. you have to stop. running a red light is one of the most dangerous things that happen. red light cameras are supposed to stop that, but a rotary, which you may see coming in, i'm not talking about dupont circle. i'm talking about modern traffic rotaries. anybody be on a new-ish rotary? have you noticed these showing up? yeah? there's going to be more and more of them. they are safer. even if you bump into somebody you're not doing a t-bone. you're going to be safer. you're not going to die unless you do something crazy. the traffic light is a solution at this time and it's focused on let's behave, let's make sure

people behave and if people don't behave, they have a problem. what do we do if we have a problem? it's called deterrent policing. police are out there surveilling, keeping an eye on everybody. you may recognize especially if you have younger kids what's it called? "the hate you give" this is the movie. it centers around the shooting of a young black man, unarmed young black man by a policeman. on the right is the shooting of philando castile. he was unarmed, i've gone through the whole transcript. i wrote an article recently about it. was it justifiable? was it not? we can argue about that but to me, that's not the story. he was pulled over something like 40 times in the previous six months to a year.

so statistics show that african-american men are not necessarily shot more than other people who were pulled over. it's just that they're pulled over so much more. they're searched way more. encounters with police often end badly. the reality is we're breaking the rules all the time, right? you're all good drivers, i know, and you always signal and you never roll through a stop sign. and you never have a brake light out but of course we all do. i've done it, right? and i'm the best driver. what we have say set of rules now and it starts in 1903 and expands which allow the police, no matter what they really think a pretextural traffic stop it's

called, maybe they think you're a gang member in the wrong part of town and you fail to signal, they can pull you over. they can even arrest you. they don't usually do. it's a pain, too much paperwork, right, but they can even haul you into jail in those states. that's weird. so i like to say, you know, we talk about driving while black, because of the way we have decided to improve the safety of motor vehicle traffic, we're all driving while black. we're all susceptible to what's called the general warrant. police have utter discretion. this is an excerpt in the '90s, supreme court decided that sobriety checkpoints were constitutional. what happened? so mothers against drunk driving got a hold of president reagan's ear, and said our children are being killed by these dastardly drunk drivers. you got to check and get them off the road.

a lot of problems with that. the methods they wanted to use were infectual. most children who die in drunk driving accidents are actually riding with the drunk or the inebriated driver. so they were sued as a fourth amendment illegal search and seizure. rehnquist said there's 25,000 a year killed by drunk drivers. therefore this is okay. very strange decision. there were not 25,000 people a year being killed and that's to me one of the most interesting things completely separate but the statistics we use to talk about this stuff. another element of fixing the driver, very strange. this is 1930s. i did my dissertation work on this. the recorders -- detroit

recorder's court traffic clinic. a few tickets too many, or got in a crash or did something weird in the courtroom, he'd send you to the psychologist. they would do a full workup, eye tests, attitude tests, intelligence test, and these which are this is the reactograph and as you could see, this is lowellson selling, a famous psychiatrist who wrote textbooks and everything but he thought this was so important, he was going to work at this court clinic and as you can see, i don't know what he's doing. this is a stage photo i'm sure from detroit news, dialing in. let me get this right. this is an objective measurements. none of these were objective. here's alan cante his assistant showing the film. i think the two ladies must be other psychologists or secretaries or whatever.

i don't think those were patients and that's what they were called, patients. so as i say, i did nigh dissertation and doctoral work one chapter on this. the idea was we find bad drivers, bad risks as drivers. we correlate that with an outcome, so in other words they do a psychiatric test, they decide you have a bad attitude or maybe you're crazy or senile or whatever and tell the judge, take his license away. or maybe they think you're a sociopath and take his license away. i correlate the p values and correlations and regressions and all that. has nothing do with whether or not you're a good driver. has to do whether you're black or white, a woman or a man, an immigrant, typically from places like syria, a jew, that would correlate very well with the outcome if you are the disposition of your case. all right, let's keep going.

i'm going to do this fairly quickly, but this is another way to fix the driver. driver's education. how many of you went to driver's ed. keep your hands up if you did in public school? yeah. thank you. public school driver's education here is the local government paying for you, now it's changed a little bit, but paying for you to learn to drive. isn't that strange? isn't that strange? why is that part of the curriculum? and what is it really about? tund are turns out the easier it got to drive and the double clutching is gone and cars are easier to drive the textbooks got bigger and bigger.drive and is gone and cars are easier to drive the textbooks got bigger and bigger. it was about citizenship, it was about becoming an adult. it was about some other things that i'm going to try to show you. so this is again the 1930s and they would have these safety

parades and different cities would get awarded each year as the safest city and i think this is kansas city. i'm not sure, but this is schoolchildren safety parade going before the reviewing stand and i want to you notice, it's hard to see, it's not a great image, but so there's the car in school or the school kids and notice this sign right here, america first, safety always. that seems to be a bit of conflating a couple of different ideas. right? don't want to take that too deeply but i've always been fascinated by that. for a long time i thought these were pictures of hitler in the back but they're traffic lights. this is a getty image, a short film, but it is a march on washington, if you will, a parade of school safety patrols. i was a school safety -- whoops,

sorry, let's go back. you got to get this to run by doing that. so there's joe dimaggio. he's the, see if we can make this bigger. again, fairly unclear but this is, see the helmets and the marching, learning to march in step and you have your -- and you have this belt. we had the orange belt, went around here and the shoulder strap and your job is the authority. authority vote for safety, right? eyes and ears, and where do you see the guys with the shields. just quick pause, if i can. that's de kalb county, georgia. in the 1980s, de kalb county, georgia, was the site of the

biggest study of driver education. and the reason was nixon, federal government were getting more interested in driver education and did it work? they found it didn't. they found in fact it caused children to get their licenses at a younger age, therefore there was more traffic involvement, in other words, driver education in the period was counterproductive. all right, let's just watch a little more marching. i wish we had the music, but look at that. what is that about? always be careful and you know, you got to give them the southern flag, that's okay, confederate soldiers, that's of course. look at this. there they are. against accidents. the flags, the white dresses.

so let me see if i can do this right, very complicated. now go away. uh-huh. sorry. that way we got to present again. come on, help me out. everybody relax. all going to come together. here's what we're going to do. that's all right. we'll get to review everything really fast. there we go. the problem with those slides, with the videos. okay. talk about engineering the driver and some of the weird ways we try to do it and obviously the ultimate solution we seem to have now is eliminate

the driver. but let's see if we can engineer a better road. again, pivotal year, 1935, this is a grant wood painting, most famous for his pitchpork lady or pitchfork land. i didn't go to the art museums, i told you. this is called "death on the ridge road." again, the response could have been, hey, slow down. don't pass. don't rush past another vehicle. don't speed. that's a two-lane road. that's a bad idea. you're a bad driver and look what's going to happen. limousine cresting, beautiful, right red truck. people are gonna die. it's gonna be gruesome. so a lot of people looked at that and said we need more laws. we need to get bad drivers off the road. other people looked at it and said let's get rid of the ridge road. let's get rid of the ridge in the road. and that's exactly what they

dawan to do. we think of the interstate highway system as 1956, eisenhower, the suburbs, tail fins, ruffled potato chips and dip and barbecues, but actually the planning begins in the 1930s and begins in this context, and it's all of the things you would expect. it is about work, right? everybody's out of work. hey, a lot of shovels to build a highway. it is about safety. even today, the interstate highway system is twice as safe as other roads as surface streets so it's really about getting rid of that, those cars, references to vehicles running willy-nilly over the landscape. we need to control them. so instead of it being a symbol of freedom or maybe it is a symbol of freedom but really about freedom, it's about controlling traffic and i like to think of it as a rail road, a

concrete rail road with rubber tires. you ever missed your exit, it's just like missing your stop on the subway. you got to go to the next one, take the train back. you get on and off in certain places and that's what makes it work. the other element of it is urban renewal and this is a great quote. this is from, i should say this is the frontest piece of the front page for the original report describing the interstate highway system, the national freeway system, delivered to fdr and he tries to get it funded and he has a very hard time. also 1939 to 1956, is actually not a huge distance in time, because of course you got the war in between, so it's also about urban renewal. a lot of people think, okay, the highways come in and that's bad

but really the purpose of these highways was not let's destroy the city, we hate the city. it is almost untenable, occupied by the humblest citizens, they fringe the business core. these are the slums right around the center of the city, fringe the business district and form the city slum a blight near its very core. so we're going to come in and use highways as a way to rebuild the city. this of course is exactly what they did. okay, this is if you went to the world's fair in 1939, you got that pin, i want one of those. i wanted a scene of the future. ralph nader, no friend of general motors, this was the general motors hall, recalled going as a young kid and walking with his parents, holding his hands and rushing off and yelling "gm, gh, gh!" he was so excited about this exhibit and lots of people were.

so this was the idea, i mean, look at how wide those highways, that looks like eight lanes and they just go right through the city. you turn the city into this vertical super block of towers and you can see it again here. this is what you would do. you wait in a long line, something like 25 million people went to this thing over the course of 1939 and '40. you would sit in something called the carry-go-round and it would rotate around this diorama built by some traffic engineers but most ly mostly normand bell. how am i doing on type? bored? breathe? you okay? we have a ways to go. stick with it, it's brilliant. it's really going to get good. let's look at what happened with those highways. those high was were doing fine when they were out in the sticks, because there was nobody to bother them, but whoop, this is washington, d.c.

this is the 1950 layout for the freeways that are going to go through the city, and very quickly, here is the inner -- whoop, inner beltway. you can see the district lines here. this is inside the district. you can have a beltway. that's going to work out good. and '66 we'll do this round thing and keep going, right? i think this is now 395 i'm guessing. is that right? that seemed like a good idea and i-95 was going to cut right across here. there was going to be something called the three sisters bridge, just ittic that highway across the river through the city. we want to revitalize the city, get rid of all those slums. turns out people lived in those slums. and this happened all around the country but i'll tell you a

little bit about it in d.c. it's a fascinating story and i've been thinking about this lately, because i don't know if any of you have been following the hogan's plan to widen the highways, going to put in dynamic tolls, just a very high-tech solution but the reality is, what are we talking about? we're talking about adding highway lanes and what got me was the rhetoric. peter khan, secretary of transportation his last job was working for a company that built dynamic tolled highways, and he got in trouble for this whole bidding thing but anyway. and people are against this. so he complained about a "very active vocal minority opposed to reducing the region's congestion." he insists we need more highway

lanes. larry hogan said there's a bunch of pro-traffic activists in town with a "plot to keep the roads filled with traffic." now that's not quite as bad as what happened in 1968. here is a quote for angela rooney, one of the leaders of the highway revolt. she would call the fbi harassment and noted that this newspaper by that she means -- sorry, "the washington post," "called this everything from communist to pinkos to that little band of discontented people." that engagement or that conflict is there and it's still there. again, i'll try to keep moving here but these are fascinating guys. this is sammy abbott. he was an old school, looks like mr. magoo but he was an old school laborite.

union organizer back in the '30s and he was really knew how to organize people to get things going. this is reginald booker. he was also a president and part of the reason i think he was the president is they adopted this slogan, white men's roads through black men's homes. if you look across the country that was very much true and some mayors even said that's why we want to do this. we want to racially segregate this town. we want to tear up, for example, west cincinnati and throw in a multilane exchange. in reality, in d.c. it wasn't quite that way. these were white and black neighborhoods these were going to go through but using that slogan really captured the moment. so i think that's interesting and i think it's interesting that we're facing that again. okay, let's keep moving. let's talk about driverless cars. what was that? okay.

where driverless cars now? what kind of cars are we getting? we're not getting safe and simple electric cars back in 1890. we got gasoline cars. we're not getting mobility is a service in the 1890s. we got sell a car to people and have them sit with the car dealer and buy a buick. that's not what's going on now. so what's changed? why driverless cars now? two things. if you look at the ride hailing companies, they are not making money. they're losing money hand over fist. the biggest problem is they have to pay people to drive cars. that is, they tried to really crush that labor and squeeze the payouts. i just rode over here on uber and the guy said he only drives for lyft. see i just called can an uber but he only drives for lyft because uber kept squeezing him

and then as far as the auto companies are concerned, you can't make money selling cars. we'll talk about that in a sec. there were with the automobile itself driverless cars in the past and so when i talk about what is a driverless car, what i mean is what kind of driverless car are we getting now and how is it different than in the past? i think there's a simple way to think about it. communitarian versus libertarian. in the past, infrastructure, market solution, general motors, working with the government, for example, now the less involvement from the government, the better, as far as these driverless car companies are concerned, not building infrastructure is better for them, okay? so driverless cars are invented many times. this is about 1958 these ads appeared in magazines. they were for electric companies trying to keep the government off the electric grid, trying to

stop nuclear power from being developed by the federal government, so they could make money selling electricity. personal reasonable thing to do. this one on the right is, if you've searched on the internet, looking for a driverless cars, every other article uses this image. nobody points out where it comes from. it actually comes from these electric companies and the thing you'll notice about it is, it's got no connection to current driverless cars. here is the lane marker. that car is going right down the center of the lane. it's not driving between the lanes. that's kind of weird. and the other thing, just as a side note, all of these silicon valley bros telling us driverless cars are coming, we're geniuses. many of them brand from google and some others are pursuing driverless cars. this was part of the same ad campaign. they're not pursuing driverless flying saucers.

they're just, you know, these things that will make a racket. safe for helicopters. this is what i want, right? puppy in the back, groceries, mom at the wheel, nice big steering wheel, a little air vent and a dome. it's a flying saucer. that i want. oh and notice there are two flying saucer family. this is what electricity will bring you, but this is out of science fiction. this in 1958 is science fact and there it is. 1958 rca, cutting into electronics, transistors and all that stuff. this is on a test track. you can see the guy on your right, he's not sitting at the steering wheel. there is no steering wheel. there's a little joy stick but no steering wheel. they're following them.

pretty sure that's an impala, i'm pretty sure it's like a '58. >> yes. >> ha ha, thank you! i was hoping there would be somebody here. don't get me started on mustangs, because i'm terrible. yeah so there it is, driverless car, works. actually works. now i'm going to show you, well i'm first going to tell you, why not? why didn't gm pursue this? in 1958, gm was the most powerful, largest profitable country -- country? company in the country. also this was required cooperation with the people who made the roads, basically the government, but some of you may be familiar with the famous quote "what's good for america is good for general motors" and vice versa so the connection between the government and general motors was there. so here's the way, and i hope this will be big enough for you.

here's the way general motors also played it. this is the firebird 2. there were three of them. i urge to you look up firebird 2 and 3. wait, back. all right, let's see if it will play. >> a using great power in small packages. >> that's not the image. wait. >> generator, exhaust heat is no longer a problem. though experimental car of tomorrow has a science fiction appearance, it is practical and usable in every design. even the electronic safety highway is feasible for the future. here tomorrow's driver might just push a button and the car would literally drive itself. its electronic receiver will pick up various impulses and roll it along to complete safety. a tv screen reveals travel information and gives highway

and weather reports. following these -- >> tv screen in the car? right? so that's there. this was quite viable. now the real thing done in 199, something called the intelligent vehicle highway system. there was considered to be a problem. this was right at the end of the building of the interstate highway systems. there was going to have to be some kind of reauthorization. are we going to build more highways? people said wait, we can't do that. let's see if we can make our existing highways more efficient. so how could we do that? squeeze more cars onto the roads and reduce congestion, which is caused by crashes. you've all been stuck behind a crash on the highway. so automated vehicle systems will be able to steer around obstacles, avoid them, if the driver misses them and it will be more relaxing, because you'll be self-driving, and cars can drive, you know, inches apart,

so let's look at this. this is 1997. it's kind of vhs quality and government production, so take a good look, but it will show you two different things. we'll see a pontiac swerving and we'll see a bunch of buicks behaving like they're in the army. okay, here we go. >> here we are both dean and i are driving with no hands. we're coming up to this obstacle up here, but this is pretty cool. i wonder what the other traffic thinks. >> it sees the barrel and is swerving. and we're around it. no hands. ♪♪ >> the consortium calls them scenarios. these scenarios demonstrate the technical feasibility of various types of automated highway technologies, and how they will increase safety and decrease traffic congestion. >> we'll be showing platoons of

vehicles, several vehicles spaced closely together that will show us -- >> so i find it hilarious, pontiac's slogan is "we build excitement" and they're just buicks, so they march along in the thing but again, it worked. it required infrastructure and it was advanced by the government. so now i'm going to wrap up quickly, talking about those same themes as we are now seeing with what i call the libertarian or ann randian driverless car. here is elaine chao talking about driverless cars and she mixes metaphors here, mixing up different technologies. it's a future where time spent commute something drastically reduced congestion. the major factor in 94% of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driving systems, this is important, a.d.s. will help

solve that. we have a.d.s. a.d.s. is maybe some of you have it on your nice new cars, self-emergency braking. you forget to brake, something is in front of you. lane keeping assist, tells you when you're going out of your lane. helps you stay? it. safety. here is elon musk who insists his cars are fully self-driving or will be next week. every year that we clay this self-driving, more people die. now he was attacking journalists who are complaining actually about the stock. he said if in writing some article that is negative that you dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you are killing people. here is lake henry ford. anthony luwann could you i did involved in the google suit, for those of you that know that. once you make a car better than the driver, it's almost irresponsible to have them

there. coil voight who founded cruise automation part of general motors. part of what is driving him is the fact that some 33 million -- 33,000 americans are killed by highway accidents every year. 90% of the time by human error. they want to eliminate the driver because we are bad drivers. it's not true. this is the 94% fallacy. they all read this document which says 94% of accidents are caused -- no, sorry. the critical reason for crashes investigated in the national motor vehicle crash causation

survey. it doesn't say who causes the crashes. you have to read the footnotes. nobody reads the footnotes. although the critical reason is an important part of the description of events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash, nor the assignment of fault to the driver, vehicle or environment. the driver is always -- i'm surprised it's not 100%. the driver is always the last link in the chain. the driver can always avoid the accident. no matter how bad an intersection, and we know there are bad intersections. and they're labeled "dangerous intersection." people go through them millions of times without crashing. thousands of times without crashing. therefore, it must be my fault. it is only my fault because i could have stopped it. they could have stopped it long

before. the way to stop it is to not get rid of me. the way to stop it is to fix the roads, fix the infrastructure so that we are using our vehicles less, driving them slower and they are safer. and the roads are safer. i think i'm almost done. what are these driverless cars? i call them diane randian. the reason they exist the way they do is because they came out of defense research projects. the idea was to come up with self-driving vehicles because they had to keep sending home notes to people who died and send the priest over. this was bad. in iraq, right? particularly, the poor guys who were contractors driving these fuel trucks to fill up the tanks. they were getting blown up. you can't put a wire in the road in iraq. the things in the road in iraq blow up. you need something that operates on its own. here are some of the real reasons. again, going back.

uber, 120 billion was their last valuation. now they're at 68 billion. their market cap, yeah, 68 billion. cal linnux plan when they heard about self-driving cars was, we're going to take all that 30% given to drivers and we'll keep it. they would take the entire affair. the project's code number is a dollar sign, and there's a new book out by mike isaac "super pumped." i put it on a list there for you, and he describes that. you can't make money selling cars. if you start with that quote on the bottom, auto companies collectively earn less than the cost of capital and most companies destroy value. this guy a professor of finance. so let me put it in simple words. building cars is a money-losing operation globally.

what do the car companies want to do? what does uber want to do? they want to get rid of the drivers. they want money and maybe someday they'll be profitable. what does general motors want to do? they want to become the faangs, the facebook and so forth. general motors has a market cap of 57 billion, price-to-earnings ratio, in other words, the stock price 5.4. ford 7.1. uber, they lose money so they don't have one, but still. amazon, 75. facebook, 35. that's what they want to be. they want to have the cost of capital to go down so they can maybe make money. okay. the last thing i'll leave with you, the last slide. there are no driverless cars. there are no driverless cars. this has been a real problem.

there was an article, a columnist for the "new york times," actually i should start with the one on the bottom there "automotive news" said when your self-driving car isn't autonomous. he was in a volvo can lane keeping and with braking but it's not like you can sit in the back seat and just let the thing go. but my favorite is from the drive, "terrified "new york times" columnist confuses volvo with magical driverless car." people are dying. the first death completed report was the death of a man named josh brown. he was driving his tesla and using it on autopilot. we talk about operational domain and all of that, but the ntsb studied it. they found that calling this thing driverless, autopilot, was a problem. adding to the problem is the moniker autopilot. joe and suzy public may conclude from the name autopilot

they need not pay attention to the driving task, because the autopilot is doing everything and that's exactly what happened. josh brown was not paying attention. he drove his car under the back end of a semitrailer and shaved off the top of his car and the top of his head. but there have been four of these that we know of, one in china, josh brown i mentioned, walter wong in california. jeremy banner. also elaine hertzberg. she was called by an uber. it was a self-driving test car, and the safety driver was paying no attention. these things don't work yet, and they're certainly not safe. so that's what i have to show you. this is the end of my road trip. that's my saab, my beloved saab. i really thank you. you have been very patient. i think i went on very long. i could go on forever. i love this stuff.

but you know, more than loving talking is listening. i would love to hear what you have to comment on, say, questions you have. you want to know how to change your oil, change a tire, i will help you. car buying advice, anything. stock picks? no. thank you. [applause] thank you. every time i do a talk, i have a hard time getting questions. yes, sir? >> doctrine doctrine the car or whatever, the liability, have they really sorted out the liability in some of these crashes? because there is a driver in the vehicle, but, you know, software was developed by somebody, the vehicle itself is built by somebody, so where are we at within the assignment of blame?

>> assignment of blame is a huge and very interesting question. i say a couple of things. one is the society of automotive historians -- automotive historians? the society of automotive engineers developed something called the levels of driverless cars. they start with zero. which is what i drive, right. they work their way up from controlling the brakes and the gas to steering and they say when you get to five, it's full self-driving. that's not full self-driving. here's what's full self-driving is. when i don't have to pay car insurance, and the car company pays the car insurance, to me, that's full self-driving. [ laughter ] now what's happened recently, these tesla crashes is, there is a suit out. there's two suits out, one in china, one here, where the argument is, they have this

little thing in the manual and it says, oh, by the way, you've got to keep on the road, you've got to keep your hands on the wheel. but there are all kinds of ways that doesn't work and the ntsb when they studied this saw that. so far, nobody seems to be holding these vehicle companies or these vehicles responsible for the crashes. yes, sir? >> can you envision a time where it will become mandatory to do autonomous driving? >> i can't imagine that, to be honest with you. i think if the argument is about safety, you really have plenty of safety systems that already make driving very, very safe. what i can see is things like keeping cars out of cities, it would be very expensive in the city, where you have pedestrians and so forth. there are a lot of things, and

we don't talk about this much. for example, 10,000 of these is about 35,000, 40,000 deaths a year. 10,000 a year are alcohol related. we have the technology to keep people from driving drunk. it's not that hard. you can put it in old cars. we don't. the idea somehow the government is going to come in and say that's illegal i find hard to believe because the government has had every opportunity to solve problems like speed. and just quickly, the european union has just instituted a new, all new cars will have speed governors. in other words, if you're on a 55 or whatever it is, 100 kilometer road, the car won't go over 100 kilometers. if you're on a 35 kilometer road, the car won't go over 35 kilometers. we have gps. we have the technology. it's not hard. i could see that coming in but i think that's different than saying you can't drive. people want to drive. yes? >> when did drivers licenses become required?

>> when did they become required? it happened in the beginning of the '30s really mostly. it spread from more populist states, denser population states out to places like, you know, north dakota. interestingly, early on, you would go to the, you know, the rmv or the dmv or whatever and they would say, are you insane? you would say no and you'd get a license. are you blind? that was another one. driver testing did not come in really until the '50s for the most part, so very, very late, you know? people drove without licenses for a long time. yes, sir? >> you showed an 1895 packard. who did the patent holder sue?

>> the patent? >> yes. >> not to sell the book but i talk about this quite a bit. so george selden had a patent in 1895, and he sued the largest automaker in the country, wynton, and he out if for a while, and then he settled. he settled for 1.25% of sales, a royalty going to selden, and this is interesting, selden was now part of the consortium that included the electric vehicle company. they had bought the patent, so he got a piece of it, the electric vehicle company got a piece of it, and another part of it went to the alam, the automobile license association members. i probably have that wrong, but you get the idea. they were essentially an industry group, a trade group.

they are often referred to as patent trolls. that comes out of -- just a historyography, that comes out of the history of henry ford. they had become known as patent trolls. ography, that comes outf the history of henry ford. they had become known as patent iography, that comes out of the history of henry ford. they had become known as patent trolls. they eventually had most of the automakers, part of this alam, again, part of this trade oh association, and it did a lot of good things. for example there were 8,000 different bolt sizes for cars. huge, 8,000 different lock washers. they consolidated that. they made standards. on the other hand, they were a monopoly. they were saying who could and couldn't be part of it. henry ford tried to join. he was rebuffed, and he lebted to sue them and that patent fight went on for years in years. in the end, the patent was declared valid but only for a w. in the end, the patent was fight went on for years in years. in the end, the patent was declared valid but only for a particular type of engine in the patent so it was basically thrown out.

by that time it had about a year's run. it's a fascinating story. the selden patent story. the one thing if you're interested in following it up, i really am proud of the way i treat it in there, because so many of them, so many of the stories are based on menry ford. does that answer it? yeah? maybe too much. okay. yes? >> your presentation makes it sound like autonomous vehicles are inevitable in the u.s. i'm interested in your opinion about the timing. how long it will be before the majority of vehicles are autonomous vehicles and how long do you think it will be until virtually all of them, all vehicles are autonomous? >> i'd say two things. one is i don't like to come and do these things where i tell everybody, nah, you know, it's never going to happen. i do think there's that possibility. it's clear that we are finding

this much harder. part of that is how bad the roads are an drivers keep getting blamed. it turns out it's hard for a robot to negotiate. two things i'd point out. i see it as a very long time before any sort of majority. there are more cars than drivers -- yeah, more cars than drivers in the country, licensed drivers, 240 million or so. we sell about 17 million new cars. average car is 12 years old. 20% of cars are over 18 years old. what does that mean? even if all of them were self-driving tomorrow, we're looking at probably two decades before we all bought them. assuming we could all buy them. the second thing is the cost of these vehicles because of the sensors and the computing power is still very large, and then finally, they don't work. [ laughter ] so, right? they speak about these edge

cases, they work except for the edge cases. it's all edge cases is what we're finding out. i certainly see them being used on a campus or in a small area or to get around a city in a small pod but i think with are very far away from outlau lawing driving and it will all be autonomous. these are great questions. sorry? >> are we going to get to the point where we'll have an electric car that might do 500 miles between charges so you could drive the car across the country and not be too worried about running out of power? >> the 500-mile is a trick yu one. that's more than the range of a gasoline car. there are two possibilities for the technology that do what you say. you get 250-300 miles, but you also need to be able to charge in six minutes. that's a very tricky business. porsche says they're coming out with something like that. so less than the 500 miles, i

think very fast-charging and charging that works. excuse me, charging that works. the weirdest thing now is, okay, you've got to sit and wait for half an hour. but what if you show up and somebody is sitting there waiting for a half an hour? it's a real problem, you know? i think there are solutions to that. maybe not just the 500 miles but yeah, i think we're getting there. sorry, you, yes? >> i have a question. seems like in your presentation we went from the advent of car into driverless. and the things that are happening now where there's actually talking between the vehicles. what do you think about that and where we're going with that? >> what you're talking about is referred to have an j 2v or v2x, because it's cool. this is something, and what it means basically, it's very much like the 1958 impala that i showed you, right, where the technology is fairly simple. it's radios. it's sensors.

and the most basic way to put it is it tells the cars to not be in the same place at the same time. right? it's been -- the radio spectrum to do this was allocated in about 2000, maybe a little earlier. auto companies have been fighting for a very long time. they're not excited about it. they say -- i'll give you what they say, which is they don't want to get stuck with an old technology. they want to use 5g cellular instead and they're not convinced it works. that's what they said about set beelts. that's what they said about air bags. that's what they said about safety glass, that's what they said, et cetera, et cetera. the pattern of behavior worries me. on the other hand, the 5g idea, it tries to do the same thing. the reason they're excited about that is once you have 5g in a car, all of this delicious

data comes in, amazon can tell you things and facebook can be there. i think that is what is going on with it. there's no reason not to have it. localities have put it in traffic lights and all of that. it's a shame it hasn't happened, does a lot of good stuff. in the book. i am happy to stay and talk. but yes. yes? >> just talk. >> sorry, yes. i was reading recently that in canada, researchers are developing morality software for driverless cars so that the car knows that if grandma is riding a bicycle and a squirrel goes across the road, it's okay to hit the squirrel but not okay to hit grandma. [ laughter ] do you see any challenges with developing that type of technology? >> it's an excellent question. oh, can i -- oh, i love this part.

so i argue that that is a kind of totalizing conversation. in other words, what they are trying to do is say the automobile, the driverless car is a new kind of moral actor. it enters a space which is going to force it to make decisions that human beings make now. right? and the reality is, it doesn't have any clue what's in the road or you know, who's driving. but there has been a lot of coverage of that. i have it, i called it the amorality of robot cars. it's up on the web on nplus1.com. there is already a moral

framework in the automobile driver road system. for example, traffic engineers don't think about safety and then mobility. they think about mobility and then safety. that's a moral choice. i think other than the fact that these philosophers are trying to, you know, make a living, it's an absurd conversation. i'll just read you very quickly. at some level, it's the useful exercise because kids in college are learning the program and they should think about this stuff. but yes. there's this guy len who has written a bunch of things. "computers could decide who lives and dies in a driverless car." here is a terrible idea, robot cars with adjustable ethics. but here is the real problem. the scenario where a car is following a truck, boxes fall off the truck. should he swerve right and hit the mini van full of kids or

swerve left because this guy is not wearing a helmet. he kind of deserves to die on this motorcycle, right? so quickly, i'll take you this. consider the problem of a car barrelling down a street where a cripple boy's crutches brake. should they swerve left to risk killing the driver against the utility pole or slam on the brakes and hope for the best? i imagine the coders, and we want the coders, and i hope you know your python code here, if kid in street is greater than 16, line print, kill kid in street. line print, we are sorry for your loss. else kill porsche, line print, serves you right, schmucker. the real question is not which way should the porsche turn. the real question is why is the porsche going so daned fast in the first place?

the porsche should not be in that situation. the porsche should not be tailgating a truck that drops boxes off the back and has to swerve. that's the problem with the driverless car. sorry, i get excited. as i say, i'm happy to take more questions. clearly we need to wrap up but thank you so much for coming. [ applause ] up. but thank you so much for coming. [ applause ] ♪♪

weekends on c-span2 bring you the best in american history and nonfiction books. this weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack attacks, saturday at 9:10 a.m. eastern. we'll hear the story behind the hijacking and passengers who attempted to take control of a plane from terrorists heading for washington, d.c. then at 2:00 p.m. eastern on the presidency. president bush's address from the oval office to the nation. at 5:30 p.m. eastern, former white house chief usher gary walters recalls events within

the white house walls. book tv features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. on sunday at 2:55 p.m. we'll continue our look back at 9/11 with historian garrett graff. and at 4:15 p.m. eastern, lawrence wright and his book "the looming tower: al qaeda and the road to 9/11." watch american history and book tv every weekend on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or visit c-span.org. sunday night on "q&a," jessica de long was chief engineer of the historic fire boat "john jay harvey" on september 11th when it was called back into service to aid firefighters following the attacks on the twin towers. in her book "saved at the sea

wall," she tells the story of the community of mariners who came to the rescue of thousands. >> the maritime evacuation that delivered nearly half a million people to safety is an incredible example of the goodness of people, that when you are given the opportunity to help, you have the tools, you have the skill set, you have the availability, that people over and over again made the choice to put themselves in harms way for the sake of fellow humans. and that is very instructive and something that we really need to continue to remember. >> jessica delong, sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's "q&a." you can also find "q&a" interviews wherever you get your podcasts. we're at the detroit historical museum and we're about to walk