Write Your Congressman: Keep the Key in a Human Hand

To the Honorable Member of Congress:

We write on behalf of the car a person owns and drives, before it quietly gives way to the pod a person merely rides.

Consider two cabins set before us this week. Hyundai and Kia have shown a system that sanitizes the interior while passengers sit in it, and they have told us plainly where it points: toward "autonomous driving and purpose-built vehicles." Their own demonstration puts it in a children's school shuttle and a fruit-selling van. Read that framing for what it is. This is a cabin engineered for strangers in sequence, a room built to clean itself between one occupant and the next precisely because no single occupant will ever keep it. It arrives, it carries you, and it leaves to collect somebody else.

Now consider the Audi Q7. Seven seats as standard, room for three child seats across the second row, a driver's seat, and a key. Someone buys this car. Someone learns where its controls sit and decides, each morning, where it goes. It is not summoned and surrendered. It is owned, and a person at the front of it is answerable for the trip.

This is not a matter for a bill, and we will not pretend a statute could hold it. We ask only this: that a car with a driver's seat and a set of keys stay within reach of the person who would keep it, before the seat belongs to no one and the wheel answers to a schedule instead of a hand.

Keep the key in a human hand. Write back to us when you have.

Respectfully, The Editors