Do driverless cars make us dumber drivers? One columnist thinks yes, and he has a point

Key points

• Columnist Adrian Chiles, writing in The Guardian, argues driverless cars are the logical, damaging endpoint of a long trend of automotive automation.
• Automatic gearboxes removed the need for drivers to physically feel a car's engine through the gear lever.
• Sat-nav let billions of people reach destinations without building a mental map of the route.
• Fully driverless cars now carry paying passengers in San Francisco and parts of China.
• The core worry is cognitive cost: what happens to the skills we simply stop practising?

Adrian Chiles isn't worried about driverless cars crashing. He's worried about what they do to the person inside.

Writing in The Guardian, Chiles traces a slide that started long before anyone used the phrase "autonomous vehicle." First came automatic transmission, the gearbox system that selects the right gear so you never have to. Your left leg and left arm, once coordinating clutch and gear lever to feel the engine's rhythm, became passengers before the rest of you did.

Then came sat-nav, the turn-by-turn navigation now built into every phone and dashboard. Before it, drivers built a genuine mental picture of their city: which roads connected, roughly how far. Sat-nav replaced that picture with a glowing arrow. You can arrive somewhere you've never been and still have no idea where it is.

So what is actually being lost?

Each automation removes a skill, and removed skills don't tend to come back. A driver who learned only on an automatic gearbox can't typically manage a manual. A generation raised on sat-nav demonstrably struggles to navigate without it.

The worry Chiles raises isn't sentimental. Cognitive scientists call it "skill fade," the measurable decline in an ability you no longer practise. Surgeons who switch to robotic-assisted tools can lose sharpness in freehand technique over time. The same logic applies behind the wheel. We covered a parallel concern on 26 August, when a Goldman Sachs executive warned that AI risks hollowing out the next generation of Wall Street analysts by doing the thinking that used to train them.

Driverless vehicles, which steer, accelerate and brake entirely on their own using cameras, radar and onboard computers, already carry paying passengers in San Francisco and parts of China. The technology works in good conditions. The automation is real and spreading: we reported in August that Waymo is planning its first European service, in Munich, by late 2027.

But Chiles's question isn't "does it work?" It's "what does it cost us?"

Should ordinary drivers be concerned?

Not immediately, not in the way a road-safety warning usually lands. Nobody's being forced into a driverless taxi tomorrow.

But the pattern he identifies is worth sitting with. Every time a new layer of automation becomes the default, the manual version quietly becomes the exception, then the quirk, then the lost art. Driving a manual gearbox is already a minority skill in many countries. Navigating by memory is already unusual.

Full self-driving is the next step on a staircase that's been descending for fifty years. Whether that's progress or loss depends on whether the skill itself had value beyond getting you from A to B. Chiles thinks it did. He's probably not wrong.