This article marks the start of blogger and former race driver Alex Roy's column for 2025AD. Each month, he will reflect on the latest developments in automated driving — from a car guy's perspective.

As a driving enthusiast, people often ask me why I’m so enthusiastic about self-driving cars. The answer seems obvious to me, but it’s not because I’m aligning myself with the pro-autonomy camp. The benefits autonomy will bring would appear to resolve a universe of problems seemingly intractable without it, but I think both sides are absolutely wrong in their binary vision of when and how autonomy will change society as we know it.

In that binary vision, each side ignores the fundamental truth underlying the other, and the mutually beneficial co-existence that will only be possible if the fundamentalists on both sides get out of the way.

I have no doubt that a Zero-day — the day when the last human will get into a car and choose to drive on a public road — is coming, but that day is so far off as to be irrelevant to any current discussion. How far off? Fifty to one hundred years.

I also don’t believe in a global, regional or even a national tipping point toward autonomy. Any profound shifts must take place at the intersection of politics and culture, which vary widely even within nations. The United States — one of the most important markets and the defacto R&D lab of the world — is a patchwork of nation-states, and if all politics is local, any technology that relies on politics will be as well.