
One of my favorite quotes, courtesy of William Gibson, is:
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed
That's how it is with self-driving vehicles. They have arrived. But not everyone knows it.
I was thinking about that at dinner last night while talking to a longtime friend who had just bought an EV and was telling me how much he loves it. And I said, "But it can't drive itself." And he looked at me like I was joking.
I wasn't.
This year, 2025, has been a self-driving journey for the Gotham Gal and me. During our winter stay in Los Angeles, we started taking Waymos over Ubers. We became so comfortable in a car without a driver that we massively preferred it.
When we got back to NYC, we missed Waymos. Eventually, we got a new Tesla Model Y with the latest self-driving hardware and software in it, and now it drives us around NYC. One of us has to sit in the driver's seat, unfortunately, but otherwise it is a very similar experience.
My colleague Nikhil posted this on his return from SF to NYC last week:
every time I come off a week of taking waymos in SF:
1. it feels increasingly strange to return to a non-autonomous city (just as it felt weird to be in cities that didn't have uber yet in 2014-2016)
2. I come away feeling like we continue to under-discuss the second order effects of self-driving inevitability + ubiquity
I think the indifference in the air is largely a function of how gradual (relatively) the rollout of AVs has been and will continue to be
NYC is a tough place to drive in. There are pedestrians and bikes and scooters coming at you from every direction. When you make turns, you have to look everywhere to make sure you aren't going to hit someone. I can't look behind me. But my car can. And so I have found that our self-driving car is able to navigate the crowded and chaotic streets of NYC so much better than we can and almost certainly better than any human can.

The $AVC Writer Coin
A Different Model For Compensating Writers
One of my strongly held beliefs is that new technologies often spur (and sometimes demand) new business models. And these new business models can often open up entirely new markets.
In web2, we saw freemium (a word that was invented here at AVC) and marketplace models (like crowdfunding) that unleashed entirely new ways of monetizing businesses and hobbies as well.


