It seems like many car companies are adding all sorts of new self-driving features to cars which are disguised as “safety” features. Things like adaptive cruise control to slow your car down before you hit the person in front of you, self parking, increasingly impressive collision avoidance systems, etc.

At the same time, I hear from a lot of people that they’ll never accept fully self-driving cars because they love driving so much, or they could never fully trust such a system, etc etc.

What if these two approaches were to collide on their way down their slippery slopes? We’d end up with the Disney self-driving car! Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom in Disney World have had self-driving cars for decades, and if you visited when you were a kid you probably rode them.

The ride is called Autopia. You get in a vehicle which looks like a modern (or old-timey) car, and you “drive” it around a track. The little car has a steering wheel and a gas pedal, so it feels like you’re driving, and you are, kind of. But, since Disney allows anyone, even little kids, to “drive”, the cars prevent you from doing anything that could hurt yourself or another driver.

While you can smash down on the gas and wildly spin the steering wheel, the car stays on its intended path. This is accomplished simply by having a raised metal rail in the middle of the “road” that prevents you from steering off the road and into a bush or tree. It’s very simple — to the point that I was incredibly bored after “driving” the cars just once as a kid.

One possible future for self driving cars goes down this path. Imagine driving a 2019 Futuris LXA semi-automated car. The cockpit may be a bit futuristic, but it’s stillvery comfortable to us from 2014. Steering wheel, speedometer, gear shifter — they’re all there. But the car is built for “ultimate comfort and safety”.

If you drive properly, obey the rules of the road and drive within relatively loose parameters, your experience will be exactly like driving today. However, if you deviate just a bit into the Danger Zone, the safety features take over and prevent you from harming yourself or others. If you were to suddenly fall asleep, instead of careening into oncoming traffic or a ditch, the car might just carefully slow itself down and park in the nearest safe area and then attempt to wake you with a loud noise or call your wife.

Similarly, if you attempt to drive the car while in an angry drunken stupor, the car will let you spin the steering wheel menacingly and stomp the gas pedal into the floor, but it won’t steer out of the proper lane or speed up faster than the speed limit. It would be just like driving an Autopia car, though in this case, the car might decide to call the police or just take you home and suggest you go sleep it off.

Maybe this is exactly how things will unfold. Even if a car is fully capable of being fully automated, many people may desire to have the illusion of control for quite some time. I get the feeling, though, that not long after cars have been fully Disneyfied people will get weary of playing pretend and decide they’d rather sleep on the way to work, or watch the morning news, or play some more Assassins Creed 7.