[dumbfounder]

Every point made by this article made me angry.

Some of the points made by the article:

-We don't know exactly how many people will be saved each year!

-We might make fewer cars!

-Our politicians haven't decided whether or not we want them!

-We can just disable phones in moving cars so people don't drive distracted!

Jamie Lincoln Kitman, you make me angry.

[Edit: formatting]

[dumbfounder]

Ah, I see the problem:

"A member of the Society of Automotive Historians, Jamie Lincoln Kitman drives a 1966 Lancia Fulvia and a 1969 Ford Lotus-Cortina, both of which run fine on unleaded."

He just wants to drive his crappy, unsafe, polluting cars around forever and make us do the same.

[sedachv]

This is not the first time I have heard similar arguments from "car people" and I don't understand why any classic car collectors would be against self-driving cars (well, rhetorically I do not, I understand that a lot of classic car people tend to be sentimental curmudgeons with a lack of basic reasoning faculties).

The #1 danger to classic cars is collisions with distracted drivers of newer, less cool cars. A friend of mine lost a late 1960s Honda CVCC (precursor to Civic) in a front-end collision after putting a lot of work swapping over a bunch of period-correct NOS modifications from another late 1960s Honda CVCC that he obtained as a wreck from another collector who wanted to sell it as a parts car to a fellow enthusiast after it had been involved in a similar front-end collision. Two classic cars lost to distracted drivers of modern shitboxes who were too busy texting to realize that they should not have been making a left-hand turn.

Even California exempts pre-1975 cars from smog testing (and soon to be pre-1980s cars). Classic cars will have no trouble being grandfathered in. I have seen people drive Model Ts around on the streets.