Are We There Yet?

Back in December, I got a new car, and I feel straight-up as if I've been vaulted into the future. And in a way, I have done a little time travel- from 2003 to 2026, the respective ages of my vehicles. 

The car I drove since back in high school after getting my license (RIP to the absolute GOAT, where are my Saab people at??) carried me a long, long way. It was a dependable little chonk of metal that, by the time we departed, had all the workings of a good car. Namely, it drove (with the exception of one harrowing summer which is the reason I own jumper cables and carry them on me like emergency antacids). Sure, it had its quirks in the end: no working AC, no radio (apparently keeping the battery from slowly draining involved snipping out the limited electronics) or internal display, doors that locked and unlocked on a mysterious schedule all their own like the timing of a tempestuous god, cigarette lighter charge port out of commission, and a check engine light that came on for about a third of every year (because of the broken display, there was really no telling why this was).  Despite these eccentricities, it was dependable in the way a stapler or a hammer is dependable: it did its job. I loved that car. For the bulk of my life, it was the only car I ever drove.

Now, I'd driven newer cars before on occasion. The various times I'd had to bring my li'l jalopy to the body shop or leave it at the car hospital for an extended stay, I'd driven rentals with wild gen alpha birth years like 2016 or even 2020. These vehicles always felt a little like spaceships to me. They drove so smoothly over the ground it was like I was on a plane. They had crazy things like backup cameras and charge ports that connected directly to my iPhone cable. I was always slightly terrified when driving them because I felt the liability for putting a dent in the spotless carapace keenly (there is absolutely a type of freedom in owning a car with enough little dings and paint issues that someone adding another one will not ruin your day). I'd ridden around with friends with newer cars. But driving my own brand-new car off the lot at the end of last year (Subaru Crosstrek, if you’re wondering) was a whole new experience altogether, and the last months have had me realizing how much I was living in the past without fully knowing it. Here are some random things anyone who owns a car built well after the turn of the century probably doesn't think about at all but which felt utterly crazy and futuristic to me as a first-time owner of my very own spacecraft.

1. when I'm sitting at a light the engine just kind of shuts off. I knew this feature existed because a friend of mine has it in her car and the first time I experienced it as a passenger I thought the car had stalled in the middle of a busy main road (generally, in my experience, NOT feeling a car idle at all is cause for alarm). No. Apparently it's just saving gas or something. (oh, good. Also, what?) I bet you didn't expect me to complain about some of these things but this one was the hardest to get used to, and I still find it jarring months later. Apparently, I can turn this feature off but I have to do it every time I get in the car, so I've just been rolling with it, no pun intended. It even kindly tells me approximately how many gallons of gas I've saved. I'm warming up to the concept of it, if not the sensation, which is still a little jarring.

2. The car has extra-sensory abilities. It knows when a car is coming up next to me, edging into my blind spot. It knows when I'm drifting out of the lines even slightly, and will yell at me for it (I disabled this feature). It will also start dinging at me when it thinks there is an OBSTACLE DETECTED in the road. These obstacles are sometimes invisible- maybe the car, like me, has anxiety and sees problems that aren't there.

3. It alerts me when the car in front of me has started moving again when I roll to a stop and rest my foot on the brake in line at the drive-thru. If I get too close, too fast to another vehicle, it starts chirping at me loudly. The guy who shared the features on an hour-long appointment told me his car saved him from getting into an accident when he literally fell asleep on the road, all because of this alert. The car started screaming at him and he literally avoided running into construction work.  Apparently, if you don’t slow down, it BRAKES FOR YOU. 

4. I can sync my phone to it and the sizable screen between the driver’s seat will show me my Google Maps all nicely blown up, which let me tell you, sure beats squinting at your iPhone sitting in the cup holder. The car is essentially a computer now, like everything else. Its display screen also tells me ‘hello’ and ‘see you soon’, so it has manners. It seems to know when I’ve put something in the back seat, and advises me to check there before I leave the car.

5. It basically can drive itself on the highway using cruise control, but I’m too chickenshit for that. As someone with so much previous conditioning, simply taking a break from operating the gas and brakes seems SO counterintuitive.

A lot of people reading this might be like, 'so what? Cars have been like this forever. Welcome to the 21st century.' And you might not be wrong. But it's new to me as a driver, so I'm going to have my moment here, all right? 

In some ways, I feel like this is impressive that in 23 years cars have come this far. It feels in a way so much safer, with all the new bells and whistles attached. But it also makes me understand how we have more and more distracted drivers on the road. When cars make it easier to drive and are automating more and more, it seems inevitable that human drivers get lazier and more negligent. Is there a day coming sooner than we think when the average teenager might sit cross-legged in the front seat of a car behind a wheel they're not touching, eyes glued to the screen of an iPhone or iPad or one of the other little technologies we take for granted that one day not too far from now we considered a fever dream?

I'd heard of self-driving cars before, and they always sounded like science fiction to me. Knowing they actually exist in limited amounts now is crazy- the knowledge completely blindsided me. But now that I have a 2026 car, I'm starting to truly appreciate that your average basic vehicle now is already halfway there.