Cars are for driving. That used to be obvious. You got in, you drove, you arrived. The machine responded to your inputs and you were responsible for the outcome. Simple. Pure. Now I'm surrounded by sensors that second guess every decision, systems that nudge the steering when I drift slightly, and cameras monitoring whether I'm looking at the road hard enough. The car doesn't trust me anymore, and frankly, I'm starting to wonder why I should trust it.
Take the top down on a Sunday morning, find a decent road, and feel the wind flatten your hair against your skull. That was the point. The engagement. The connection between what you wanted the car to do and what actually happened. Throttle response, gear selection, steering weight. You controlled all of it. Now half the systems are designed to stop me from controlling anything, and the other half are preparing for the day when I won't need to be here at all.
Driver assistance started reasonably enough. Anti lock brakes made sense. Traction control saved lives. Then it became parking sensors, then cameras, then systems that brake for you when something appears ahead. Each addition seemed logical in isolation, but the cumulative effect is a car that treats me like I'm dangerously incompetent. Lane keeping assistance fights me when I move over for a cyclist. Adaptive cruise control brakes unexpectedly because it got confused by a shadow. Speed limiters nag me on roads where the database is wrong. I spend more time managing the electronics than actually driving.
And now they want to remove me entirely. Autonomous driving. The ultimate expression of distrust in human capability. Sit back, relax, let the car handle it. Why would I want that? Why would anyone who actually enjoys driving want that? The answer, apparently, is that I'm not the target market anymore. The target is people who see driving as a chore, an inconvenient necessity between points A and B. They want to scroll through phones or catch up on emails while the car chauffeurs them around. Fine for them. Infuriating for those of us who bought the car specifically because we wanted to drive it.
Car reviews have become pointless exercises in describing technology I'll never use. How well does the adaptive cruise work in traffic? Who cares. Does the lane assist feel natural? Irrelevant. Can you update the software over the air? Why does that matter when the steering feel is numb and the throttle response is filtered through three computers trying to optimize efficiency? Reviewers talk about zero to sixty times and then spend paragraphs explaining how the car prevents you from actually using that acceleration except in perfect conditions the computer deems acceptable.
The 1975 Land Rover sitting in my garage has none of this. It has a steering wheel, a manual gearbox, an engine, and exactly zero systems trying to help me drive better. It's agricultural, unrefined, and requires constant attention to keep in a straight line. It's brilliant. When I turn the wheel, it turns. When I press the throttle, it accelerates. When I change gear, I feel the mechanism engage through the lever. There's no abstraction layer, no computer deciding whether my request is appropriate. It does what I tell it to do, immediately, every time.
Modern cars are faster, safer, more efficient, and more comfortable than anything from fifty years ago. I understand the engineering achievement. I recognize the benefits. But somewhere in the pursuit of perfection, manufacturers forgot that some of us actually like driving and don't want to be passengers in our own vehicles. The future they're building is one where the car does everything and I do nothing. That's not progress. That's the end of driving as anything more than supervised sitting. You can keep your autonomous future. I'll take the Land Rover.
