I think they are quite good.

I would say several years ago,

if you talked to somebody in San Francisco,

they would say they seems pretty safe, but yeah, they kind of drive kind of jurgly. Sometimes you're not sure what they're going to do. They, like, stop a lot. And so one level is, like, make sure it won't hit anything. But then another level is, like, make it kind of smoothly integrate into the flow of traffic and do kind of what you expect.

And they're getting pretty good at that.

I'm sure they're still room for improvement.

Hello, and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

A few weeks ago, we published a conversation about the book Life After Cars, which was, I thought, a really interesting conversation and also provoked a lot of really interesting feedback from people.

I think it's one of those topics because it's so embedded in how we live our lives.

And we spend in cars, how we get to places, what our commutes look like, how much traffic we're in, how we get around

the topography of the location we find ourselves in, that it got a lot of responses. And I got a really

interesting email from a journalist and actually previous with podcast named Tim Lee, Timothy Lee,

who I've known for years. And Tim has been reporting on economics and tech and policy for like over a decade.

And he's been doing really interesting stuff about automated driving, self-driving cars.

He wrote me his really interesting email that sort of triggered a whole bunch of questions

about the topic we were talking about, about driving and life

and cars, and what the next chapter of that whole conversation might be like, particularly because

this technology of self-driving cars is one of those technologies that for a long time felt like

vaporware. It felt like, oh, it's just around the corner. Oh, six months from now,

we're going to figure this out. And people were saying this for years, I think maybe even a decade.

And there were huge headlines about big money being invested into startups. We're going to figure

this out and quietly fizzled. And as we've all been paying a lot of attention to

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