Self-driving cars got boring. We heard the hype about the world-changing benefits. We saw Google's plucky test cars venture out in the world. But somewhere along the way, autonomous vehicles drove into an expanse of indifference, the place where tech gets stuck until the day it actually changes your life.

"Why are you yelling at me?" I blurt out loud at the car. "You're the one driving."

Which brings me to the Nissan Rogue that is sort-of driving me down I-95 toward Washington, D.C. The car is steering, making minute adjustments to keep me in my lane. It's maintaining our speed but easing off or braking if we get to close to the vehicle in front. In short, it's doing all the busy work needed to chew up highway miles, while I... supervise. It's not quite driving, but it's not not driving either.

No, this is not yet the future we were promised, where you kick back with a coffee or a cold one and hand over complete control to the car. But we're already entering a new era, one in which cars tackle the worst parts of driving: diminishing the drudgery of stop-and-go commutes and long tedious road trips, and maybe granting us a little more peace of mind.

Kindly Assist Me

2018 Nissan Rogue Andrew Moseman

My ride for the weekend, a shocking orange 2018 Rogue, comes with what Nissan calls ProPilot Assist. It's the automaker's trademark name for the next step in vehicle autonomy, akin to Cadillac's Super Cruise or Tesla's Autopilot. This growing group of AI assistants is about to bring much more impressive vehicle autonomy to the masses.

Think of it this way: Driver assist technologies, such as the lane-keeping feature that beeps if you're about to veer across the line, are more than simple safety aids. They are the building blocks of a car that can actually drive itself. With ProPilot assist, Nissan assembles several of those aids into a more capable computer driving partner than you've ever had.

Lock in the assist while you're motoring down the interstate and a few things happen at once. Your Nissan engages cruise control to maintain speed. In the display on your dashboard, stripes on either side of your car's avatar turn from white to green to tell you the Rogue has locked in on the lane and will now help you keep it between the lines. In front of the animated car, horizontal lines indicate how far back the car will stay from vehicle in front. You can adjust this to three, two, or one line, with one meaning the car will leave the smallest gap.

Nissan ProPilot steering wheel configuration. Nissan

Letting Go

The first time I turn on the assistant and it creeps up on a slower car in front of us, every fiber of driving experience wants to brake so I don't slam that Buick in the back. But the Rogue brakes itself to match speed, no problem. Out on the interstate, I start to feel the invisible hands of the lane-keep system nudge us a little this way or that, correcting for my imperfect line. It's remarkably easy to let go.

Nissan's instructions are clear: ProPilot is not a self-driving feature. A human driver needs to be in the cockpit, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. In fact, the Rogue has sensors in the steering wheel and will honk if you have the gall to take both hands off for more than about a second.

But if we're being honest, the Rogue is doing most of the tasks that make up "driving." Watching your speed? Car. Staying in your lane? Car. Staying a safe distance back of the vehicle in front? Car. With these lower-level tasks taken care of, what's left for the driver are the higher-order functions: Deciding where to go, how fast to get there, and whom to pass. The feeling is freeing, like graduating from driving the ship to being its captain.

As New Jersey recedes, I consider cruising this way across the lonely expanse of Nebraska, where I'm from. One could cross the state with practically no human input, and ProPilot Assist would be there to make sure you don't veer into the rumble bars when you zone out.



We're a Team, Dammit

Shenandoah National Park Andrew Moseman

Somewhere in Maryland, the car chastises me for driving too close to a lane divider. "Why are you yelling at me?" I can't help but say out loud. "You're the one driving."

Clearly, Nissan's little helper and I are still learning to work together. After hundreds of miles in the Rogue, I instinctively turn on ProPilot to handle the tedium of staying in a lane. I may have logged tens of thousands of highway miles in my life, but I'll never be as unfailingly solid at this dull task as a machine can be. Plus, a nagging thought creeps into my mind: What if I drove without the helper and caused an accident? Wouldn't it eat at me that I could've turned on the driver aid, but didn't? It's just a hell of a lot easier to let the machine do it, especially when you're deep into a road trip, the time concentration and attention might lag.

The challenge, then, is to stay focused on the road once the task of driving becomes little more than supervising a robot. Even with the car doing 90 percent of the work, a driver can't afford a lapse at highway speeds. As great as they may be, ProPilot and its ilk have an occasional tendency to throw up their hands and tell you to take control because the car can't see the road lines (or they randomly disappear).

The limits of autonomy can be frighteningly clear. ProPilot is built for the highway, a place of relatively simple variables—there are lanes and speed limits and other cars, but not much else. The world beyond the highway is a more complex space for cars to understand, full of pedestrians and cyclists and random objects. Just this weekend an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian, the first known fatality attributed to an autonomous vehicle.

Andrew Moseman

The true self-driving car—the one so capable it needs no human nanny and has no steering wheel—remains mired in the always-five-years-away zone. It is not quite ready for the real world, and real world is not quite ready for the self-driving car. In the meantime, though, the interstate is ripe for innovation. Your next vehicle won't drive everywhere for you while you play with your phone, but it just might be able to tackle the worst parts of the job.

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