The Presidential Candidates and Autonomous Vehicles

By Jordan McGillis

Hot-button tech issues like antitrust enforcement and cryptocurrency regulation abound this election season, but one technological development ought to be endorsed by both candidates: autonomous vehicles (AVs). Driverless cars increase road safety by lowering the number of accidents caused by human error, and they can be especially helpful for people who, for various reasons, are unable to drive themselves. Regardless of the election’s outcome, our new president should lead the way in supporting this useful and important technology.

Greater Safety for Vulnerable Groups

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from age 70 onward, a driver’s collision risk rises, with drivers over 80 just as likely to crash cars as drivers in their 20s. Elderly drivers are also more likely to sustain grave injuries or to perish in any given collision than younger people. Drivers age 80 and over are more than three times as likely to die in a police-reported crash than drivers under 60, and they’re more than 50% more likely to die in a police-reported crash than a driver between the ages of 60 and 79.

The arrival of AVs is therefore good news for older drivers. Across a number of American cities, companies such as Zoox, Cruise and Waymo—the current industry leader—are rolling out AI-powered self-driving cars that can get elderly people from point A to point B while both increasing their safety and preserving their independence.

The prospect of robotaxis roving American streets will disconcert some people, but evidence is mounting that the technology has already eclipsed the road safety of human drivers. Swiss Re, an insurer, produced an analysis of Waymo’s driving data in October 2023, finding that, based on the data from property damage claims, Waymo vehicles perform 75% better than the human driver baseline. Independent technology journalist Timothy B. Lee assessed a larger pool of Waymo evidence this September, concluding, similarly, that Waymo vehicles’ injury crash rate is 50% to 67% lower than the human driver baseline.

For elderly people and others with limited physical capabilities, the benefits of AVs extend beyond general safety metrics; indeed, AVs offer several attributes that normal rideshares and taxis cannot. Zoox, for example, has designed its vehicles to allow for much easier entry than standard cars do today. Instead of having two or three rows of seats facing forward with passengers’ knees against the back of the row ahead, Zoox vehicles position two rows of seats facing inward, toward each other, with open space in the middle for comfortable internal maneuvering. Instead of a single door swinging horizontally and requiring an awkward side-shimmy, Zoox doors open like an elevator to allow someone to step or roll a chair into the spacious cabin. Zoox is able to maximize internal space by forgoing a steering wheel and driver’s seat altogether.

Similarly, for people with impaired hearing, AVs eliminate concerns about communicating with a driver or having a driver trying to communicate through an app while in motion. For people with impaired vision, AVs eliminate worries about entrusting strangers.

Where the Candidates Stand

With Vice President Kamala Harris’ message of an inclusive “opportunity economy,” AVs would seem to be an innovation she should champion. They not only offer special advantages to people with physical limitations, but they also appeal to young voters who might see the embrace of technology as a substantiation of Harris’ rallying cry, “We’re not going back.” And yet—despite her success in coaxing a “car guy” out of the driver’s seat—Harris has not established a position on AVs going forward.

One reason is that her party is entangled with labor unions that oppose automation. As the November election nears, Harris is walking a labor tightrope in the aftermath of a port strike against new technology on the East Coast. In her home state of California, meanwhile, the Teamsters have worked with the Democrat-dominated legislature to outlaw autonomous freight trucks and to encumber the rollout of autonomous taxis.

Encouragingly, however, California Governor Gavin Newsom—a close Harris ally—has bucked the left-wing labor alliance on this issue. Newsom has taken a measured approach on AVs, vetoing one bill to ban autonomous trucks and another that would have set untenable data reporting requirements, but signing a third that creates guidelines for AVs encountering first responders in emergency situations. Newsom’s openness to AVs has established a permission structure for Democrats who might otherwise be queasy about technology reaching farther into our lives.

At the moment, though, it is the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, who looks more receptive to big, bold innovations. In recent months Trump has become buddy-buddy with hard tech’s singular icon, Elon Musk. Far from being a one-off bromance, the Trump-Musk relationship is emblematic of Silicon Valley’s rising opinion of the former president. These days it is “increasingly not just permitted,” Jon Askonas and Robert Bellafiore Jr. wrote for City Journal this summer, “but downright fashionable” for technologists to swing to the right.

While Trump hasn’t been much more forthright about autonomous vehicles on the campaign trail than Harris, you can learn a lot about people by the friends they keep—and Trump’s newest friend sees AVs as the automotive holy grail. While an October headline at The Verge broadcast that Trump told a Detroit audience he wanted to ban AVs, within context it was clear that Trump was actually calling for a ban against Chinese AVs. Trump is making a bid for techno-patriotism very much in keeping with emergent Silicon Valley trends, evinced not only by Musk’s SpaceX, but also by Palmer Luckey’s Anduril and Marc Andreessen’s American Dynamism project.

When Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, the automation of transportation and other industries wasn’t even a blip on the election radar. In 2020 it wasn’t much of a factor either. But today—in a post-ChatGPT world—automation is on people’s minds. Most headlines now warn of the risks artificial intelligence presents. The reality is, in the form of autonomous vehicles, it presents a huge potential benefit to elderly and marginalized individuals, as well as our communities as a whole.

Donald Trump—tacitly—has incorporated hard tech into his portfolio as we’ve entered the election’s home stretch. Kamala Harris has been reluctant. But if she really wants to sell an inclusive vision to the country of “not going back,” she should chart the way forward with the embrace of autonomous driving innovation.

Jordan McGillis (@jordanmcgillis) is the economics editor of City Journal. The views expressed here are his own.