No one likes to be in a car accident, but it happens. Maybe the "accident" part is your fault, maybe it's someone else's fault—or maybe it's the conditions. It's often a mixture of everything and anything.
Cars are (sometimes) beautiful but dangerous metallic beasts. Every time you step inside one, whether as driver or passenger, you are entering into an agreement with everyone else on the road: be cool, be safe.
But it's not a real agreement! People do stupid shit all the time!
The nature of that stupid shit, and what role we play in it, is what Rob and Patrick started thinking about after recording Remap Radio.
Patrick: So Rob, while recording the podcast this week, a story popped into my head while you were talking about Keep Driving but there wasn’t an appropriate time to bring it up. In Keep Driving, you talked about how a choice at the start of the game about how “close” you are with your parents determines how likely your in-game parents are to respond to a phone call for help, aka the game’s way of offering you a way to continue without the run starting from scratch.
My dad was an angry where-the-fuck-were-you stickler when it came to coming home at curfew.
Yeah, sure, there was a “legal” curfew that technically went hand-in-hand with this, but my dad wasn’t exactly worried about the cops pulling me and my brother over, he just couldn’t fall asleep until we were home. If you were late—or close to late—it ensured you were getting berated after walking in the door. No, this did result in a change of behavior where my brother and I came home early. Instead, we’d race home minutes ahead of curfew and eat the beration.
Anyway, I started driving a few years ahead of cell phones—you know, the dinky flip phone era where you could, at best, run a version of Snake. I’m hanging out one night with my first girlfriend and like clockwork, push how long I’m out to the brink. No one could blame me. No berating could have gotten me out sooner. But the route home is quiet and predictable, and I know how long it’ll take if I hit the lights wrong and a few minutes are added to the drive back.
What I didn’t account for—or really, what I ignored—was the rain outside. It wasn’t pouring, though. This wasn’t a storm but the light trickle you get used to during a midwest summer.
Rob, you learn about hydroplaning when you’re in drivers school, but there truly is no way to understand how elements like rain, snow, and wind are going to impact the driving experience until you have your first “oh shit” moment as it feels like the vehicle is starting to slip away.
I distinctly remember the critical error in question. At a stoplight, the water pitter pattering down on the windshield, I slammed on the gas. It was over instantly. You’re not supposed to do that.
Next, my car swerved back and forth before coming to a stop basically straight ahead—but not after skidding alongside a telephone pole. Thankfully, I did not hit the telephone pole, but where the car ended up kinda looked like it was parked, except there was no driveway and the car had busted through a fence. There weren’t any cars out at this hour, especially in this weather, but the few that were around simply drove past me. I was in an accident and couldn’t get any help.
I was, thankfully, uninjured and no one else was involved in the accident. But I was also scared shitless. Without a cell phone, I walked to a nearby convenience store, dialed 1-800-COLLECT, and yelled “MOM DAD I WAS IN AN ACCIDENT” when the prompt to say who’s calling came up. My mom picked up the phone, asked where I was, and I went back to waiting in the rain.
Minutes later, both of them showed up and we called 9-1-1 together. And there was no yelling.
Most people have some kind of accident when they start driving. How about you, Rob? And how did that conversation, if it happened, go over with your parents?
Rob: Most American drivers are poorly trained and prepared. Because you’re right, most people are not going to have any preparation for how bad conditions are going to affect a car’s handling, and what to do when you start to lose control of a car. In the driver’s education program I took part in, I think I did three practice drives in compact sedans that just happened to be in perfect dry weather in the summer. The exam to get my license was easier than all those drives. Driving anything other than a small car four-cylinder car, night driving, non-asphalt surfaces, rain, snow, ice… all those things were things I confronted in uncontrolled real-world conditions. There are expensive driving programs where they do expose you to handling a car on wet, slick road surfaces, but those are usually run as adjuncts to performance driving programs for amateur or aspiring racers. The foundational expectation of American life is that just about everyone will get a license, and they will keep that license barring exceptional proof of their unfitness.
I grew up being motorsports-crazy, and driving games are probably the genre I have played the most through my life. My father also commuted in and out of Chicago every day on the Bormann, Ryan, and Kennedy expressways. He saw enough harrowing stuff that he wanted to make sure I was prepared and had the correct responses programmed before I ever sat behind the wheel. I remember sitting with him in his Pontiac Grand Prix whooshing into Chicago during a heavy rainstorm and him easing off the gas and sliding out of the left lane, and extending a finger to point at cars streaking past through the lake-sized puddles on the Ryan. Calling attention to the way the water was collecting around the tires and spraying out of the treads, he explained the physics of hydroplaning and how it would start happening before I could really feel it, and how the key was not to panic once I realized the car couldn’t completely be steered. I don’t think I was even 13 at this point. Between little driving lectures like that and just the time spent in racing sims like Indycar Racing, I was pretty well-drilled in things like regaining control of a car in a slide, or how to be smooth on the throttle and brakes.
So I ended up coming through a lot of early real-world tests unscathed. I encountered a few “heart in mouth” moments commuting around Green Bay when I lived in Wisconsin, where blizzards could dump far more snow on the roads than the plows could hope to keep up with and you’d find yourself stuck in trains of overconfident Cheeseheads all churning at high speed through unplowed snow in the tire-tracks of the cars ahead. I saw someone driving slightly erratically on the Mass Turnpike, just drifting slightly in their lane, and was already letting them get further ahead of me when they clipped a guardrail and spun out in front of me. That impressed the hell out of MK, let me tell you, because from her perspective it looked like I had been able to see the future.I think I’ve gotten like four speeding violations and been involved in zero accidents or collisions since I started driving. Now that record is skewed by the fact that I log fewer hours on the road than most people, but I also think there’s a phenomenon where the more experienced you get, the more cautious you become. If I can’t see the sides of the road up ahead or if the road rises a bit before coming to a dip, I just assume there’s a speed trap nearby and make sure I’m not doing “pull me over” speeds. That means I’m rarely doing “pull me over” speeds at all, though. I remember my dad gave me a radar detector at one point and the result was I basically never went above the speed limit at all because it was constantly flagging possible sensors and police radios. Eventually I threw the thing in the glovebox and never looked back.
Likewise, the thing I fear most on the road is other people’s mistakes. I’m good at spotting people who are going to be trouble, even if I don’t fully know why. Something about the car they are driving, a way I’ve seen them move, will just scream, “Oblivious! Road rage! Phone screen!” and I’ll try to avoid being in a position where I won’t be able to react if they do the most dangerous and incompetent thing imaginable.
That’s what scares me these days: the thing you just couldn’t see coming or couldn’t possibly react to. Years ago some friends of MK’s were killed in a head-on collision because someone in the midst of a psychiatric episode (or so they claimed) hit them from behind at over 120 MPH and launched them across the median into another car with another family in it. I think about them every few weeks, about making Christmas cookies with them, about the mementos we still have from them that we can’t bring out because looking at them is too painful.
I wonder if I, or anyone, could have avoided it. If there was a moment where you could spot what was coming in your mirror and get out of the way, or prepare to take the hit in a less devastating fashion.
I don’t think there was. I think there are limits to what alertness and reflexes can save you from. Ultimately, you’re dependent on other people having at least a modicum of awareness and responsibility for their own safety and others’. The person who just rockets down the road, their car an unguided missile in their hands? Or the trucker who fumbled a water bottle and had it roll behind their brake pedal before he plowed into MK’s car? I don’t have advice for avoiding those people. I just have advice on how not to be that person.
Patrick: All my dad did was drive when he was younger, because he was a salesperson. He was a good, safe driver—maybe why he was so paranoid about us driving, too. (I’ve asked my mom if she thinks he would have been more or less paranoid in an era of “tracking” kids via phones, and mostly she thinks it would have made him more paranoid to track a little blue dot.)
I bring this up because an incident that’s stuck in my mind is a time when he came to pick me up from college. I could’ve taken the bus up north, but he seemed to like the drive and it gave us a chance to catch up amidst the lengthy drive through central Illinois’ cornfields. As we left school, a massive rain storm blew through, the kind where your windshield wipers cannot keep up. It was the one time I saw my father just say “screw it” and pulled over until the rain slowed.
I’d never seen my dad blink like that before, you know? I watched as he grumbled, other cars passing us by, and passing quiet judgement over other people, knowing it was a poor decision.
I feel you about the dangers of other people, or what’s out of your control. My mom was in a major accident a little over a year ago, where a traffic camera showed her, out of nowhere, going from a normal driving speed to something north of 90 miles per hour. She slammed into an intersection, totalled her car, and somehow she was the only one with any real injury. (Even that, thank god, was a broken collar bone and a broken foot, both of which herald naturally.) The police and doctors determined it was a “medical incident,” which is to say they don’t think she did anything wrong, but months and months later, we don’t know what happened. A stroke? Maybe? Maybe. Nothing’s happened since, as her medical paperwork inches through the state.
This was someone who never enjoyed driving to begin, so an excuse to stop isn’t unwelcome.
My kids enter a world where driving is changing. Some cars are driving themselves. Other cars are kind of?? driving themselves. Whatever they drive will have useful sensors to help them navigate danger(s), amidst distracting screens that make doing basic car tasks much harder.
When my oldest was born eight years ago, right around the time when dipshits like Musk started saying fully automated driving was “around the corner,” I actually wondered if it was possible she was entering a world where she wouldn’t really need a drivers license. She will, it seems, but it feels like the dangers she’ll face are ones that, in some ways, I won’t be as familiar with.
Rob: There’s always been a school of thought that the more you automate on a car, the less safe it becomes. Manual transmission die-hards argue (and I don’t know the actual evidence, so don’t hold me to this) that a stick shift just makes certain kinds of accident almost impossible. Your mother’s, for instance: if she had a lapse behind the wheel and the car is a manual, she probably can’t hit the speed she did. She’d have missed the shift, the rev limiter would have kicked in, and she’d have been going slower in the intersection. It’s harder to have an accident where you don’t know you were in drive rather than reverse, or you thought you were hitting the brake but hit the gas instead, because there is so much more happening than just hitting a single pedal to make the car move.
Driver assists concern me because they introduce ambiguity that strikes me as very dangerous. When I’m driving, I’m driving. Eyes sweeping between the mirrors and the road, hands on the wheel. But if I have a car that can, and indeed marketing for it encourages me to let it, drive itself? Not completely, I’m still responsible for intervening if I spot trouble, and the manual maybe has a disclaimer that says the car requires the supervision of a driver, but also I don’t really have to be driving, just making sure it’s driving well? That’s a recipe for disaster! There’s less for me to do as a driver, so I’m going to be bored and disengaged from the task. But also the car probably can’t be trusted to handle the kind of hazards that can appear suddenly. It also introduces weird ambiguity: it can feel very strange when a car’s traction control and anti-lock brakes are both going, now just imagine you see trouble coming and want to drive on the shoulder to avoid it, but the car wants to maintain position and just hit the brakes. Who is the better judge? It doesn’t really matter, the point is both attempts to avoid the collision might require full commitment. If you are trying to do one thing and intervene over an automatic system trying to do another, the car is not going to take either approach efficiently.
Those systems will probably save some people from inattentive drivers, but they’re also going to create so many more people who have terrible, tuned-out driving habits that I think they’re going to make roads less safe overall.
There’s an article I probably think about every few weeks since I read it. It’s this Vanity Fair analysis of how that Air France flight crashed in the Atlantic about 10 or 15 years ago. Plane didn’t break, weather wasn’t bad. The autopilot flew the plane into some conditions where it was operating near a stall, where it can’t generate enough lift to maintain altitude. The autopilot wanted to pitch the nose down to gain speed and lift, which is the correct and flight school 101 thing to do. The pilot, however, heard a stall warning and then saw the plane losing altitude, so he tried to throw it into a climb. That did stall the plane and caused it to fall like a rock out of the sky. On the one hand it was obviously pilot error, but one of the points made in the article is, it was an error that only happens when the pilot has become completely disengaged from the task. There’s a point where if you put enough automatic systems in something like a plane, you shouldn’t have a pilot anywhere near it because there won’t be enough for them to do to maintain preparedness to make good decisions. So where is the point you stop putting in automatic safety enhancements because they start removing the most powerful safety system of all: a well-trained and alert human operator? Where is the point where you can say a machine is safer without anyone running it at all?
I don’t think we’re going to answer these questions before we’ve substantially unleashed chaos on the roads, because so much of this is being driven from a product development standpoint rather than a safety standpoint. Every time you hear about Tesla owners eating shit “testing” their car’s self-driving capabilities, you’re basically hearing about a rogue car company letting people turn public roads into a beta test. And the whole industry is following suit. They’ve spent decades making cars that are bigger, heavier, and immeasurably less fun to drive, and sent them onto congested public roads that have made everyone’s commute miserable no matter where they live. Daily driving is boring and frustrating and just about everyone would rather spend that time reading a book or doing work so now cars are being marketed with the promise, “Don’t worry, you barely have to bother driving this piece of shit.”
That’s not going to go well, but it’s coming regardless. My advice: get your kid some sim time, and pose some scenarios to them when you’re driving around. Imagine the person in the next lane over suddenly does the most-boneheaded thing possible. How can you avoid being swept up in it? Because that training will be good no matter if the bonehead is a drunk driver, a bad driver, or a glitchy robot.