What Jim Carroll Saw Coming
Original archive: 2013-04-22 — Trend: The Future of the Automobile and Automotive Retail (No One Uses Their Smart TV Because They’re Pretty Dumb!).
Carroll’s archive on the future of the automobile explored how the vehicle industry might evolve beyond familiar mechanical and business assumptions. Driver-assistance and automated-driving systems are part of that wider shift. The voyage distinguishes partial automation from a truly self-driving car, rather than using the older theme to imply an achieved prediction.
What has changed in the real world
An autonomous vehicle combines several difficult systems: sensors to observe its surroundings, maps or scene models to understand them, software to plan a route and controls to move safely. Success is not just driving a familiar road once. The vehicle must respond appropriately when construction moves a lane, emergency services appear or a pedestrian behaves unexpectedly. Different driving domains—dense city streets, highways, snow-covered roads—create different technical and regulatory demands.
Carroll’s automotive foresight was examining the way the car was becoming a connected, increasingly software-driven product. The later leap toward driverless service has happened unevenly. Waymo’s published ride numbers show substantial commercial activity in some mapped operating areas. They are company-reported, and they should not be generalized to every city, weather condition or vehicle type. It is entirely possible for highly capable urban ride services to coexist with ordinary human driving for decades.
A fact that changes the scale of the question
Waymo reported more than 250,000 paid autonomous trips each week across four U.S. cities in May 2025. The original source is Waymo, May 2025 (company-reported). The distinction behind the number or capability matters just as much as the headline: Those were trips within defined operating areas, not proof of driverless operation on all roads and in all weather. The point of introducing the fact here is to show the actual scale of the machinery, knowledge, data or infrastructure involved in this particular voyage. It is not evidence that the imagined 2036 destination is inevitable.
2036: one possible destination
An imagined scene, not an account of an event that has happened.
Imagine a trip home in 2036. An automated shuttle handles most of the journey inside a defined service district, but a steep unmapped rural road remains outside its operating territory. A human driver or another mobility option takes over. A rider sees a simple explanation of where the system will and will not go. The future is not necessarily the disappearance of steering wheels. It might be a patchwork of increasingly reliable automated journeys.
One image captures the possibility: An autonomous shuttle handles the mapped route while a human driver still owns the rural detour. The conditions behind that image deserve attention. A future built around this capability would also change work, trust, operating costs or personal choices for someone outside the technology industry. That is why this voyage is less about predicting the arrival date of a device and more about understanding the environment that would let it matter. Different communities and businesses could arrive at the same destination at different speeds, or choose a different route altogether.
The detour that could change everything
Safety is a statistical and social question. Clear mileage and crash comparisons must account for where vehicles operate and what kinds of trips they serve. Insurance, liability, disabled access and public transport integration matter. So does local trust. A service that performs well in good conditions but withdraws during difficult weather may still be valuable, yet far less universal than promotional language suggests.
There is no requirement that technical progress and adoption advance together. People may welcome one application and reject another. The most persuasive future is the one that survives comparison with cheaper, simpler or better-understood alternatives. This is also where the archive has value: an old idea can be supported in direction while the timetable, commercial model or surrounding institutions evolve in ways that could not have been obvious at the start. That history deserves to be told rather than edited into perfect hindsight.
The next chapter is still being written
Watch for independent safety evaluations, expanded operating conditions and transparent rules for unusual events. The key evidence is repeated service with clearly defined limitations, not a promotional video of a car completing a difficult demonstration.
The practical test is this: Separate geo-fenced commercial services from fully general driverless capability The question for the people making choices today is not whether the imagined 2036 scene is visually convincing. It is whether emerging evidence alters a real decision: where to invest, what to build, which safeguards to demand, and which assumptions should be checked again next year. Will autonomy arrive as a patchwork of zones rather than a universal switch? The answer is not locked in. That is what makes tomorrow a voyage worth taking.