This Changes Everything (Part III, where "Everything" means me...)

Contentment.

Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful feeling.

Imagine the moments when you feel contentment. Where you are. What you are doing. Or not doing. Wherever and whatever lulls you into peace. When calm settles into you. When you are full of quiet joy just to be where you are, as you are, at that moment.

Contentment.

It is such an improbable, seemingly ludicrous word to use describing how I feel sitting behind the wheel of my car as it whizzes down the highway at 70 miles an hour in the fast lane on the left, urgently needing to find some openings between the cars and trucks and buses barreling along all around us, in order to cross all the other lanes to the right so we can take an exit ramp fast approaching just down the road.

But contentment is the right word to describe how I feel. Yes, I am behind the wheel. But making those maneuvers is not my problem. My hands are not on the steering wheel, and my feet are not on any of the pedals. I am not anxiously checking the rear-view mirror and the side mirrors every two seconds to avoid trouble with another vehicle. I’m just appreciatively noticing how the car itself is accomplishing the transitions, as Patti and I quietly continue our conversation.

All the while, I am experiencing total contentment.

It is the best single word I can use to describe how it feels to be in my new Tesla when it is being operated under the control of its “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)”. In the last month or so, that FSD (Supervised) system has driven me about 2,500 miles while I was supervising its decisions and carrying on conversations with family and other friends…in contentment.

How is that possible? In Part II of this series, I tried to explain how the FSD (Supervised) technology transforms the operation of the car. Today, I’ll try to explain how it has transformed the driver—me.

And a dramatic transformation it has been. Almost overnight, I have gone from being an avid enthusiast who has passionately loved high-performance driving for seventy-five years, to an elderly observer contentedly languishing behind the wheel.

Not a likely metamorphosis for this “car nut” growing up in car-crazy California in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I became employed as an auto mechanic when I was only twelve years old. I learned to do everything possible to overhaul and repair cars. I began driving (without benefit of license) about the same time. During my teen years I purchased, modified, customized, and re-sold about a dozen old cars. I drag raced them on the back streets of Fresno. I careened wildly around the foothill roads of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I loved the sights and sounds of doing 100 miles an hour anywhere. I did everything possible to kill myself except actually kill myself by ridiculously high-speed cornering at every opportunity through residential neighborhoods.

Failing to finish myself off on the streets of Fresno, I made a more sincere effort when I crashed my race-prepared ’52 MG TD on a rural road heading for the Pebble Beach road races in 1956. My best buddy Greg was with me, and we emerged from the hospital in Hollister with one fractured skull, one broken ankle, a cracked sternum, and sixty-six stitches between us. Six of those stitches were in my tongue, which had been split in two on the steering wheel. No anesthetic. Just six lashes through the tongue with a hooked needle and thread.

Memorable.

But all that experience and pain only deepened my love of driving which I refined during several million more miles behind the wheel of many spirited cars. The highlight: a stint at the Skip Barber driving school at Lime Rock Raceway in Connecticut at age sixty-four. In the final competitive event, I was chosen by my much-younger teammates to drive a tie-breaking final time-trial. What a trip! Roaring around the tricky race course in a fierce ten-cylinder Dodge Viper, whipping into tight turns at high speeds, sliding sideways much of the time, tires spinning and screeching and smoking, setting the best time of the day to win the event. Still ranks as one of my all-time fondest performances.

And now you want me to just hand control of my car over to some cameras and a computer?

Yeah, yeah, I’ve always known I would do this if I could. But it’s so…unlikely. I began pondering a slippery question: Won’t I just be anxious all the time, not being in control? Just how long will it be (if ever) before I actually trust some automatic system to be as good a driver as I am? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? When (if ever) will I stop hovering over it, second-guessing its every decision and maneuver? When (if ever) will I truly relinquish control—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally? How long might that take?

About three minutes, as it turns out.

I took delivery of my new car at noon on a Tuesday. An agent at the Tesla dealership showed me how to operate a few things, including how to tell the car where I wanted it to take me. I dictated my home address, and pushed the blue “Begin Self-Driving” button on the dashboard screen. The car began to move.

The Tesla dealership here is located deep within a very large shopping center where it is surrounded by dozens of stores and acres of parking lot. Getting out to a public roadway requires approximately six or eight stops and turns, making your way through the scores of cars pulling in and out of parking places, and dozens of shoppers walking or pushing carts in the lanes where cars drive. Then, the exit from the shopping center onto a public roadway is very convoluted, riddled with stop signs and traffic lights and cars converging from multiple lanes and directions simultaneously.

But after about three minutes of my just sitting behind the wheel, watching in absolute amazement as the car carefully wove its way through all that complexity and emerged onto Quakerbridge Road heading across the canal and into the surrounding farmlands, I found myself wondering, “Why in the name of heaven would I ever, ever want to do that myself???”

And of course the immediate answer was, and is, “I wouldn’t. Of course not. Never”.

It’s still my answer. Here’s why. Every single minute we are driving a car, some considerable portion of our mind is occupied with multiple overlapping tasks:

· Deciding the route we will take when we commence moving toward somewhere else.

· Calculating the rate of closure between cars on a roadway as we seek an opening to pull out from a stop sight or parking place...or to change lanes.

· Noticing changing traffic conditions, the behavior of kids, and pedestrians, and bikes, and traffic lights.

· Checking our speed relative to the speed limit on that roadway.

· Indicating our intentions to other cars by use of our turn signals, or braking, or with a hand wave inviting them to turn in front of us.

· Deciding whether to speed up to get through that traffic light turning yellow, or to slow down to stop.

· Wondering whether we will arrive at our destination when we intend, or later…and perhaps fretting about whether it matters or not.

· Considering mid-course alternatives to our intended route to get there.

· Checking the rear-view mirror repeatedly to see if we’re holding up cars behind us.

· And (for me, anyhow), harboring the fear that as I age, my diminished capacities might cause me to miss something and hurt someone

· In addition…(okay, it’s your turn; you already have in mind a few things to add to the list that I haven’t touched on yet.)

To state the obvious: driving a car unavoidably taxes both the mind and the emotions.

The alternative: You can just sit quietly and let the car itself take all that away from you, so that you can simply enjoy conversation with loved ones or listen to a book or a podcast or some favorite music as the car carries you to your destination.

But that can be easier said than done. My three-minute surrender of control came almost miraculously.

I learned many decades ago in a Twelve-Step program that I am a competitive control freak, and the antidote is to relinquish my assumed role as General Manager of the Universe. Like, intercept those spontaneous urges, turn things over, let them go, adopt and repeat NMP (Not My Problem) as a guiding mantra.

While I have done my inadequate best to temper my more obnoxious features, the control-freak in me has still shown up in ridiculous ways over these ensuing years. Like even when driving. I want to get to a common destination before you. Or take the very fastest conceivable way. Or hustle through that traffic light ahead before it has a chance to change to yellow and then red.

And so the most unexpected change in “This Changes Everything” is how my self-driving car has swept away not only the tasks of driving but also my control-freakishness while I am behind the wheel of a car. I cannot possibly express how astonishing this is to me. When FSD (Supervised) started driving me, I realized to my puzzlement that I simply don’t care what route it chooses to get me wherever we’re going. I don’t care. Why should I? Why would I? And I simply don’t care whether we arrive at 11:41 or 11:48. Why would I? And I simply don’t care whether we make it through that traffic light ahead before it flips yellow or red. Why would I?

Why the hell would I care?

If there is an alternative, why would I ever choose to continue spending even the teensiest scintilla of my thought or my emotional reserves on those things, anyhow? Why. Why. Seriously, why. Just out of lifelong habit, I guess. But once I realize they are optional claims on my life energy, I am beyond ecstatic to wave them goodbye. Bye-bye. Adios. I have better things to do.

Even if that “better” is nothing. Especially if that “better” is nothing. Turn it over. Let it go. Let the car worry about how to safely get where we’re going. After all, it is going to improve the actual driving process thirty times every second. I’m not.

But there is an even more profound change for me than my delight in relinquishing control. On March 14, 1974, I was genuinely traumatized when an elderly driver lost control of his car in downtown Princeton and hideously mangled a three year old child to death. Our entire community was devastated.

At that instant, I swore that I would never, never, ever be that elderly driver. I have repeatedly declared my readiness to hand over my car keys the moment anyone suggested I was becoming impaired. But in hopes of delaying that moment, I have also spent these past fifty years tracking the development of driver-assist systems, in hopes that eventually I might safely extend my years behind the wheel. And now my hopes have been fully realized. Today I operate my new Tesla entirely free of the truly agonizing fear that haunted me through all these years.

The gift of that freedom and the contentment conferred by self-driving technology rank surprisingly high among the limitless undeserved blessings that loved ones and circumstances have showered on me during my long lifetime. No wonder I celebrate them all with this special license plate I just installed on my new car: