[...] Cars are expensive after all, and many users aren’t very good at them: continuously anxious when driving, forced into a ‘radical dependence’ on the commercial service industry for maintenance and repairs. The autonomous car seems to hold out a promise of relief from personal involvement in any of that.

But hold on a minute. What is being sketched here, in patchy but hopeful fashion, sometimes resembles what might be called a paradigm shift. Without even looking at the machine itself—that amorphously defined but widely talented robotic device that will save us money, absolve us of personal responsibility for road crashes and otherwise be seen, when authorized, and not heard, much like a well-behaved Victorian child—what is suggested seems to imply a transformation of the mode of production, consumption and private ownership of the automobile, which remains a central (if slowly declining) pillar of global consumer capitalism (the industry is currently suffering from a massive glut in worldwide manufacturing capacity, exacerbated by China’s entry into large-scale car production).