This Changes Everything

At 2:15PM on March 14, 1974, an elderly driver lost control of his vehicle while exiting a parking lot on University Place here in Princeton. It lurched across the road and onto a sidewalk where a three year old girl was standing next to her brother and mother in front of a masonry pillar. The vehicle crushed her into a hideously unrecognizable mass.

The entire community was deeply traumatized. Some of us still are. Our daughter who was only nine at the time can still, a half century later, recall the gory details, and she still shudders today when driving by the scene. Me too.

On that day in 1974, I made a deep and solemn vow to myself: “I will never, never, never, ever be that elderly driver.”

I am fortunate to be a person who has lived my whole life with little or no fear. But I have actually borne for fifty-two years after that event the specific fear that someday I might become that driver. As I moved into my late-80s, the fear became more pronounced. Enough so that I wrote about it here more than three years ago: https://www.thedaleyalmanac.com/post/hand-over-my-car-keys (May 24, 2023).

As I noted in that article, I was becoming a conscientious student of the emerging technologies known as “driver assist” systems—automatic braking, cruise control, lane control, and, more lately, even “self-driving” capabilities. I have followed each new development, knowing that one day I would either buy whichever car has the absolute best of these, or hand over my keys and retire from driving completely.

Last spring, well into my 90^th year, I realized it was now or never. I would not wait until that tragic day when I hated myself for not having done it yesterday. It was time to take action. But I was not going to settle for anything but the safest possible vehicle. So which would that be?

In Princeton, we are blessed to have friends and neighbors who are among the world’s foremost authorities on just about any subject under the sun—including autonomous vehicle technology. The verdict is unequivocal: nothing else is even close to the super-sophisticated and abundantly validated safety of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” system, particularly because its AI function learns instantaneously from the company’s incalculable treasury of real-life data harvested over the previous decade through the sensors on millions of Tesla vehicles.

But the moral question of contributing even one dollar to the wealth of the world’s richest and arguably most despicable human being—that would be Elon Musk—was less easily resolved. In particular, his truly sadistic destruction of USAID and his ordering the incineration of warehouses full of food destined for starving people rivals the Holocaust in sheer inhumanity, if not scale.

This hit our home in a particularly painful way. An intimate member of our multi-generational household has given his entire extraordinary life to the mission of USAID and the elimination of human hunger on earth. Then Sam watched Musk destroy it all in an insanely savage, monumentally illegal two-week massacre that, in effect, murdered millions. The most relentlessly driven, hardest-working man I have ever known, a man driven entirely by self-giving love, Sam nevertheless felt an instant and totally justified hatred for Elon Musk—a hatred that seemingly precluded my ever choosing to purchase and park a Tesla in our family driveway.

So I sat down with him and explained my dilemma—I could settle for a second-best means of being a safe driver, or relinquish driving entirely.

Some things are nearly unimaginable. One of them is the lifetime of eighty-hour weeks he has devoted to generating the political will to end world hunger, and the incalculably beneficial effects of his tireless work around the globe. Another is the ability of one monster to destroy it all in one spree of madness. But in an act of unthinkable generosity, Sam embraced my dilemma—and after some deep soul-searching, he offered his blessing on my purchasing a Tesla. That was his word: blessing.

I am now into my fourth week of driving (or being driven by) a Tesla Model Y. Sam’s blessing has enabled me to enjoy first-hand the nearly-miraculous ability to drive safely while elderly, something that now fascinates my aged friends. They are eager to understand its consequences for us all, and I am eager to share what I have learned. When I sat down to begin this piece, I intended to dive right into great detail about my astonishing experience of “supervising” this “Full Self-Driving” car that has now delivered me several thousand miles across five states without my touching the steering wheel or pedals.

But instead of continuing with that, I am realizing in this moment that there is something far more urgent to celebrate than technological genius. It is human grace. So I would really rather just quietly conclude my writing for now, leaving the vision of Sam’s blessing in the air—an illustration of one person’s grace standing as the ultimate antithesis of another person’s evil genius.

I will return to the wonders of self-driving cars for us elderly drivers in a subsequent article, but in these darkened moments we’re better served by just savoring glimpses of grace…