Photo by Cynthia Larsen

Austin City Limits isn’t just the name of a music show

By Ed Goldman

The trouble with adopting a motto for your town is that you then have to live up to it. For example, the unofficial slogan of the capital of Texas is “Keep Austin Weird.” 

It was thought up by a guy named Red Wassenich and at first glance I thought a website said he was a Libertarian. Then I cleaned my glasses. Neither a libertine nor even a librettist—and, born in February, not even a Libra—Red was actually a librarian.

So how would the late Mr. Wassenich have reacted to this news?  In his beloved city and in just eight months, there were 14 crashes involving Tesla robo-taxis. The invisible-cyborg cabs collided with a bus, a few big trucks, and what reports called “fixed objects”—which I suppose are parked cars, fruit carts, homes, office campuses, and spouses who refuse to budge an inch no matter how convincing you think your argument is. 

The crash rates were reported to be “significantly higher than human-driven vehicles.” So, tell me, Austin: Is this weird enough for you? Or should we introduce into the admixture a handful of extraterrestrials, A-I-generated crossing guards and Al Yankovic?

The crashes surprised me. I tend to think of human-driven Priuses as posing more of a roadway danger than android-piloted Teslas—mainly because robots don’t panic about making left turns or driving more than 30 miles per hour on freeway on-ramps. Prius drivers do. The Priusians also don’t know how to maneuver through a supermarket parking lot at 5:30 p.m., when other drivers, fresh off work and hungry, are apt to be a tad cranky. They don’t seem to know how to parallel park or remember how to back into or out their own driveways. 

Meanwhile, I keep wondering why an undeniably visionary, arguably charismatic and possibly psychotic entrepreneur like Elon Musk thought we wanted or needed robotic taxis—or any kind of self-driving cars?

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be the self who’d drive. One of the joys of reaching California’s legal driving age—it’s about 16 from state to state, but I believe in Arkansas it may be 11—was that I no longer had to ask one of my parents to ferry me to school or on a date.  And I could now say confidently I’d “left something in my car,” even though using that possessive pronoun (“my,” if you’re just joining us) was presumptuous. It wasn’t “my” car. And even if I’d been allowed to work a 90-hour shift at the May Company, where I worked in the Men’s Clothing department, and had managed to save enough money to buy a car of my own, chances are my parents would have insisted I put that money into a college savings account instead. So the car I’d “left something in” would still have belonged to my folks, a reality that seems unfair on so many levels. 

The thrill of having a license and driving a car has stayed with me for most of my adult life. Every time I scoot behind the steering wheel, I feel momentarily powerful, as though I’m controlling an infinitesimal speck of my destiny. I certainly don’t get that feeling when I board a plane, even if I’ve been upgraded to Big-Deal A-List First-Class Pompous-Ass level. I’m still not going to arrive at my destination any sooner than when I fly Schlemiel Standby, sitting in the last possible seat in the plane, where I’m tossed a bag of stale pretzels a few minutes before disembarking. That process itself may take as long as the flight.