THEY SAY IT’LL BE LIKE HORSES. That once the world truly jibes with the self-driving car, humans will be moved to hang up the keys. Maybe through gentle social shaming at first. Then increased insurance costs or government regulation. Human-guided automobiles will be limited to private land or dedicated parks, as with horses or dirt bikes or anything else fun and whiffing of danger.

This feature originally appeared in the September, 2018 issue of R&T.

It’s also been suggested that we won’t have much choice—that eventually, new cars will winnow to a few sensible blueprints. Mostly short-range electric runabouts, mid-size SUVs, and throwback exotics. Those blueprints now power three growing segments of the new-car market. So we built a crystal ball of sorts, to suss a glimpse of the future. We rented a private hillclimb, for our own version of that driving park. And I spent a full day there, bombing around and thinking about freedom: Would an ideal driving bubble—no speed limits, police, or racetrack conventions—be like Disneyland without the lines? Would it feel limiting and snow-globey, or like a hint of a better world? Where do you go when you have a machine built to move, but you can’t leave the house?

William Gibson famously posited that the future is already here, if not evenly distributed. I was mostly just curious if the place is gonna know how to dance.

Our backdrop was ancient but felt timeless. Maryhill Loops Road was constructed from 1909 to 1913. It was the first paved road in Washington State, an experiment, one of the first pieces of asphalt to use large-radius “horseshoe” turns to tame steep grades. The road’s two miles of pavement contain 25 corners, zero driveways or intersections, and 850 feet of elevation change. All tucked into a narrow valley of verdant hills 100 miles east of Portland, Oregon. The Columbia River is so close, you can see whitecaps.

DW BURNETT

The Loops were built by Sam Hill, one of America’s first advocates for quality pavement. “Good roads,” he once said, “are my religion.” In the early days of the automobile, this was actually a controversial position; many people didn’t believe in spending for such things when much of the country still couldn’t afford a car. Hill spent anyway. He brought in a Seattle engineer named Sam Lancaster, asking him to find the best way up one of Maryhill’s steepest valleys. Lancaster treated the job like science: records of construction methods, traffic flow, weather patterns. As Peg Willis wrote in her book Building the Columbia River Highway, for him, “a failed road was not considered a failure. It was instead an example of what not to do [next].”

World-building stuff, from when driving was new. And its relationship with the world in flux, as now.

Hill’s road is no longer public, and is currently owned by a nearby art museum. (Philosophy question: Can a road be art? If you say no, go stick your head in a bucket.) The Loops are usually a quiet hiking path, closed to motorized traffic. We brought a Ferrari, an electric BMW, and a 707-hp Jeep. I roped in Bob Sorokanich, R&T’s deputy online editor, for help shuffling cars and to keep me from eloping with the Ferrari. And like all solo dancing, it eventually got a little funky.

DW BURNETT

Attack of the The Pods

WE NEEDED A POD. An urban runabout designed for one job at the expense of other talents. It needed to be electric, because that’s where the car business is going. And it had to look the part.

So we called BMW and borrowed $58,695 worth of 2018 i3s. Carbon-fiber bodywork and frame, 181 hp, 3300 pounds of driveline and seat and battery. Styled like cautious science fiction with a dust of Bavarian fussiness. Car people have traditionally loathed pods. They’re short on range and long on compromise, meant for compact environments. The loathing is a bit unfair; the best city cars are a result of conscious and careful engineering choices, and careful engineering that you don’t like is not the same as bad engineering.

Still, the i3 is something of an acquired taste. In addition to the battery’s 97-mile EPA range, the i3s offers an optional 34-hp range-extending gas engine. It charges the battery but cannot directly drive the wheels and runs off a tiny, 1.9-gallon fuel tank. With the battery fully depleted, the i3 can be limited to around 34 hp. The BMW thus seems to pair the cheek of a Tesla with the vibe of a Chevy Volt but the practicality of neither. Its engine provides an EPA-certified 83 miles of extra range, but its modest output limits you to a fraction of throttle, no matter how much you press the pedal. On flat ground, that might mean 70 or 80 mph. On a long hill, you might cap at 35. In real-world, mixed-use driving, that 1.9-gallon tank is good for about 60 miles of usable travel.

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Maryhill, however, was perfect. I ripped up and down it several times when we arrived, gaping at the landscape. The place felt so idyllic, it could have been yanked from a movie. The pavement, black and crisp, looks almost new, even though it isn’t. It leaves the entrance gate at the bottom of the valley and blasts under a stand of trees, dark shadows for whole seconds. It jinks and cuts north, seemingly avoiding the climb as long as possible. When the sweepers come, one after the other, they vary in camber and cadence, looping around graded foothills. The land is like a lumpy blanket, covered in velvety grass and almost bereft of trees. In spring, the sunlight does that Pacific-Northwest light thing, cold and uninteresting until early afternoon, when it cracks into a golden glow that lasts for hours.

The BMW i3s has a lower suspension, 11 more horsepower, and slightly wider wheels and tires compared with a regular i3. It felt like a mutant golf cart. Tall and tippy but chuckable and cheeky, with surprisingly good steering. Maybe a bit too much head toss and instability on midcorner bumps.

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I drove and drove, in love with the hill, lap after lap, playing with brake regen and lines and lane camber. Then I sat for a bit at the top of the road and just drank in the land. It felt like an exceedingly chill track day crossed with a good vacation—controlled freedom, but no reason to get hurried. Plus that inevitable moment where you take a breather and find yourself sitting in the sun, eyes closed, a lifetime away from anything that feels like the real world.

Then the battery ran dry and the engine kicked on and that was enough of that. Listening to tires and thinking about quiet momentum and road reverie, all broken by the limitations of now-science, in the form of a droning little two-cylinder that BMW borrowed from one of its production scooters.

Dinky range can be forgiven, and so can trudging up a hill at 38 mph. The two together are enough to make a generally uncranky driver-type person think happy thoughts about taking the bus. So I moved on to a car that weighs almost as much as a bus. And is around three hundred times more nuts.

DW Burnett

KEEP ON TRUCKIN’

JEEP’S 707-HP GRAND CHEROKEE TRACKHAWK is a poster child for the modern: a platform-shared SUV with computer controlled all-wheel-drive; a a massively powerful and digitally managed engine; and forced induction. Plus insanity. A nontraditional fast car that met a host of traditional watermarks and then stomped them flat while yelling loud noises about Michigan.

Bob Sorokanich knew all this. Bob grew up around Jeeps. He thinks about them constantly. He has a Craigslist search history papered with Nineties Cherokees. Bob had driven the thing before. I hadn’t. At the bottom of the Loops, he showed me the truck’s launch control. It is activated through a short dance of button pushing, at the end of which you adjust the system’s standard rpm-hold function. A launch requires nothing from you except to hold the wheel straight and properly sidestep the brake. Then the thing lights off for the territories while simultaneously using blower whine to outshout your brain.

Launch control is why the Trackhawk exists. It is what you focus on when Chrysler is mad enough to stuff a 6.2-liter, 707-hp supercharged V-8 in anything. It is especially what you focus on when that anything is an all-wheel-drive Jeep with stout diffs and enough tire to mash asphalt to powder.

DW BURNETT

Chrysler says the Trackhawk will see 60 mph in 3.5 seconds. The wallop felt impossible, given the mass at stake. After the first hard launch, I turned to Bob, shell-shocked.

“This is insane,” I said. He grinned in a way that you do not grin at children.

Chrysler also says the Trackhawk weighs nearly 5400 pounds. You notice. The Jeep’s body motions tilt weather patterns. The steering is talkative in the same way that a couch cushion telegraphs what happens beneath the couch. But the controls are linear and predictable. The Brembos are more than stout enough for road use. The sum package abuses tires like fire and takes several beats to set in a corner, but it is undeniably big-boy potent.

After the third or fourth run, Bob and I stopped again to chat. Launch aside, the truck didn’t feel mind-blowingly fast, even given the road’s long straights and climbs.

“Power doesn’t seem to make a car noticeably quicker here,” Bob said. “It just makes it . . . hootier.”

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Novelty and spectacle seemed important. Half of a good back road is surprise, and the Loops were already starting to feel like a collection of pace notes. Braking points. Where to trust the camber. The corners with zero shoulder on exit—generally just a sheer drop into the ravine below—but yards on entry.

Still, it was strangely comforting to have no governing body save personal restraint. Especially since the truck embodied a lack of that. Wanting a Trackhawk felt hugely right but also patently wrong. Why are SUVs fashionable? Why now? A station wagon but fatter, less aerodynamic, thirstier? At a time when most of the world seems focused on resource use and abuse? Consumer-facing industries rarely chase social or infrastructural good unless people want to buy the result. Seven-hundred-horsepower Jeeps only exist if we decide Want and Cool and Asphalt Bludgeon are apex needs. Which is all well and good if you only think short-term, and about yourself. Which has long been the driving force in car buying, so maybe all of this is moot.

Or maybe it’s about to change and we’ll be better because of that change. I can’t tell.

I parked the Trackhawk at the top of the hill. Building a road to learn more about roads suddenly seemed like an awfully noble thing to do. I looked at Bob.

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“You know, I’m fascinated with times this country has redesigned its infrastructure, figuring out how to build itself. You ever wonder if midcentury progress felt as uncertain as the automated car does now? Or if it was just comforting prosperity, when gas was cheap and car questions seemed way less existential?”

A public highway snaked down the other side of the valley. We watched trucks rumble across it for a minute.

“I don’t know,” Bob finally said. “But this is amazing. Coming from the East Coast, I’m so used to thinking of the beautiful routes as the arduous ones. That you can end up on beauty by accident, driving a truck somewhere? It’s a different relationship with the land.”

I thought for a moment on how we seem wired to take freedoms for granted, once they settle into our day-to-day fabric. Then I noticed Bob had strolled over to the Ferrari. And then he fired it up, and I stopped thinking.

DW BURNETT

THROWBACK TO THE FUTURE

THE TACH GOES TO 10,000. It revs to 8900. Over the few days in which we borrowed the car from Ferrari, three people at three different gas stations mistook it for a new Corvette. Which is fair, because an 812 Superfast does not look wholly unlike a new Corvette. The catch is, the 812 costs $340,712 and has a 6.5-liter, 789-hp V-12, and that is not usually the stuff of Corvettes.

Same for the cute little red knob on the steering wheel. It adjusts chassis and drivetrain behavior. It is meant to make you think of Formula 1 cars. F1 cars have a lot of steering-wheel buttons. At one point, they also had naturally aspirated V-12s and a sound like mating animals. Now they wear turbo-hybrid V-6s and sound like a vacuum cleaner trying to inhale a bowl of soup, which means that most new high-performance road cars are more aurally intoxicating than the most technologically advanced race cars on the planet. Ferrari spends a lot of time making sure its modern road cars recall its vintage road cars in sound and feel, and those old cars were designed to recall the company’s old Formula 1 cars, and the 812 sounds like the aforementioned horny animal, and if you think about this too much, your head caves in.

Again, automotive progress does not always make sense. Ferraris are not normal. This is part of their charm.

The 812 Superfast is a heavy refresh of Ferrari’s 2012– 2017 F12. We brought it because it represents an old school of thought—like the F12, the 812 is long-legged and rear-drive, naturally aspirated, and aimed at long-distance travel—through a modern lens. It is part of that odd group of hyperexpensive automobiles that exist entirely apart from logic. Their qualities translate to market demand, not the other way around. And their one-percent customers will likely still be buying them long after the rest of the world has turned in their keys.

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The 812 uses rear-wheel steering to improve stability at both high and low speed, and its engine makes 59 more horsepower than its cousin in the F12. (Personally, I’d still have an F12, because that car has hydraulically assisted steering, and the 812’s is electrically boosted. The wheel in the older car just plain had more to say.) Not that any of this mattered on the Loops. Any modern Ferrari is a cannon. The 812’s wheel still murmurs out a decent amount of feedback. You can walk up to the limits of the front tires and then vector the car with your right foot. Turn-in is hyperquick, the nose almost leaping down to an apex. The car begs you to go through corners in binary, either a spastic, slidey dance or a graceful, skating ballet at the limit of the tire. Nor does it prompt you to think too much. You just tool around contemplating the act of getting arrested, because the engine only makes the good voodoo at speeds where people get arrested.

It was in the 812 that I first noticed the road’s grain. Laps and laps into the day, the bits of pavement where the painted yellow lane striping had feathered and worn. The short black hillclimb events leading down to each apex, like a dictionary illustration for trail braking. The car somehow managed to be both in my face and out of the way at the same time.

DW Burnett

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I began to feel cooped up. I parked the Ferrari, got back into the i3, and tried the road again. Same deal. Then the Jeep, which felt similar. Then back to the Ferrari. I met Bob back at the top of the hill. He was drinking a bottle of water and gazing at the river. He motioned to the 812.

“The thing I’ve noticed about Ferraris is that they work very hard to remind you of what sports cars once were,” he said. “All these tropes, which is really very odd, because you’re ostensibly buying a Ferrari because it’s the fastest, horniest, most modern thing it could be. A new McLaren doesn’t need to drive like an old McLaren, it just needs to be fast and their version of good.”

“I don’t know if any of this is bad,” I said.

DW Burnett

“I think we find more honesty in EVs, though. Machines not contrived to be fun, but fun because of what they are. That i3 is a hoot, and it’s a hoot in a different way from a Ferrari with 789 hp and gumball Pirellis.”

He wasn’t wrong about the BMW. It had a compellingly simple vibe. Same for the Trackhawk, oddly. Probably because, unlike a lot of modern cars, they are not anodyne experiences. They are designed to constantly remind you of why you chose them, unlike, say, a toaster. Which is also odd, because every time I’ve had the chance to interview someone working in high-level automotive research, they’ve eventually noted that cars should evolve into shared commodities. Interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, as practical and quirk-free as appliances.

The difference is, no one ever started a magazine about how much fun it is to use a toaster.

DW Burnett

IF YOU HAD NEVER DRIVEN A CAR, you might think all vehicles and roads were just variations on a theme. But so much of the appeal with this stuff is in the difference. The freedom to have a sex-steeped sports car or a focused little city bomber or a fire-breathing truck, then rip it to Alaska or Florida or the backside of nowhere for relatively little cost. Anytime that freedom is impinged upon, its appeal withers a bit, even if the cuts are small and largely rational. Speed limits are inarguably safer than no speed limits. Snow globes like Maryhill are better than no roads at all. Curbing vehicle deaths by trading humans for lines of code? How do you say no to not killing people?

And yet. Sam Hill probably looked at cars a little more romantically than we do now. The machine we love has come to seem far more fragile and serendipitous than he ever could have guessed.

Maybe it’ll all be private parks and horse analogies. Perhaps my grandchildren will see pictures of me in a 707-hp truck, in a dirty and occasionally homicidal road network, and wonder how we could have been so stupid as to hope it was all anything but temporary. The future rarely reveals itself in advance. But my head keeps wandering to optimism. How the options with a set of keys are almost more important than what you do with them. They kick us to chase answers when we don’t even know the questions.

DW Burnett

At the end of the day, I climbed into the i3, headed for Seattle and home. The car’s battery was empty, the A/C off to help range, the engine moaning softly. At one point, a few hours into the trip, I climbed through a sunlit desert valley. Uphill, into a headwind, on a 55-mph road on a warm day, the BMW struggled to hit 40.

For no particular reason, it occurred to me that a Ford Model T cruised at about the same speed. The land meandered by, dotted with gravel side roads. The radio played some perfect but forgettable song. I knew where I was going but felt like I didn’t. I was moving. I couldn’t think of a single other thing that mattered.

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