When will self-driving cars arrive? Depends on who you ask. The VCs believe what they’re told by their portfolio companies. Automakers will say anything to inflate their stock price relative to Tesla. Self-driving evangelists and “keynote speakers” on LinkedIn? Broken clocks not yet right even once. The media? There are still less than ten people writing intelligently on a market expected to hit $7 trillion. If you doubt self-driving cars are coming, you haven’t paid attention to the rate of human ingenuity and technological progress. Conversely, if you believe more than 1% of the statements coming out of Detroit, Germany, Japan and Silicon Valley about when they’re getting here, you’re as deluded as their investors. The question isn’t when, it’s how and where. In the third leg of my trip around the world to investigate the future of transportation, we begin an attempt to set a Cannonball Run record across India. The car? A 2017 Renault Kwid, which isn’t quite the world’s cheapest car, but at $4,000 is definitely the world’s cheapest good car. The route? Nearly 1,000 miles from Chennai to Mumbai, from India’s worst roads to its best. Why? To glean what lessons we can about self-driving cars from what will soon be the third largest car market in the world. Indian driving is crazy, duh You don’t need to go there to know that driving in India is crazy. Actually, you do. My old friend Jason Torchinsky wrote a wonderful story about his visit I thought would prepare me for my journey. I was wrong. When people in Los Angeles, or New York, or London, or Atlanta, or any major city in the western world complain about traffic, they are joking. Unless they were on I-95 trying to escape Hurricane Irma, they know nothing. They’ve never seen traffic. I would have taken better pictures if my life hadn’t been in danger from the moment we pulled out of the hotel in Chennai. Also in danger? The jobs of the courageous and highly optimistic Renault-Nissan executives who greenlit our journey, which included airfare and the Kwid press car. What were they hoping to accomplish? It certainly wasn’t a driving record, for within minutes of departure we encountered a mass of un-helmeted people on bikes and mopeds in the middle of traffic, ignoring lane discipline, helmet laws and common sense. And yes, that’s a toddler on the front of that motorcycle.

Anand Gowpa

Speaking of helmet laws, here’s fun headline from 2012:

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Digest that, and then let’s move on. What’s this? Indian lane splitting, practiced by cars and bikes simultaneously, at all speeds. If there are lane lines at all.

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How about highway driving? No problem.

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Things get even more fun at night, when no one wears reflective clothing and most two wheelers lack proper lighting. Pedestrians? Animals? That cow-catchers aren’t standard from the factory is incredible.

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Actually, highway driving is a problem, especially in weather. “Weather” often means a sunny, humid day pivoting to monsoon conditions in less than fifteen seconds. Those reports of weather bringing out the best in people, as in Texas and Florida the last two weeks? Weather also brings out the worst, at least when it comes to road safety. Take a close look at the following image.

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This is a two-lane highway. And that is a mass of bicycles, motorcycles and a trike parked in the passing lane under a bridge. Why? Because the riders have dismounted to shield themselves from the rain. This isn’t unusual. This is just the best image I could pull from the GoPro mounted on our front bumper, which was lucky to survive the trip. Two others mounted there didn’t, both victims of road debris. Before leaving the hotel in Chennai, I cracked a joke about how our seemingly lowly Renault wouldn’t be able to keep up in traffic. How wrong I was. That’s the Kwid’s speedo at 115 kph, or about 72 mph, which I’m pretty sure was above the speed limit, if there had been any signs indicating what the speed limit was. That was a rare opportunity, and about 50% faster than what most Indian commuters will ever see.

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The reality looks more like this: cows roaming freely in and near major cities, with traffic stopping at unexpected times to allow them to wander—or sit—unhindered.

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And then there was the most surreal car ad of all time. Under almost no circumstances do you want to own a Porsche 911 in India. Okay, maybe in sections of cosmopolitan Mumbai and Delhi, but it would have to be the worst ownership experience of all time. The roads range from battle-scarred hellscape to pretty good, but leaning heavily toward hellscape. You don’t want 18’s. You don’t even want 17’s. You want 14 inch wheels with the fattest, cheapest tires you can find, because they will be punctured.

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Take a closer look and you’ll notice India's former F1 driver Narain Karthikeyan standing next to that 911. Let me tell you, Karthikeyan got a bad rap. He was racing in the wrong series. There’s a reason F1 champions usually come from countries with amazing highways and twisty roads. They grow up on them. WRC champions? They come from Scandinavia. Learn to drive on icy roads, and you’ll master them. NASCAR’s long straights? Perfect for racers who grow up with big, long interstates. Karthikeyan? He should be doing Red Bull Global Rallycross. The Indian Culture/Law Gap It’s not that there aren’t laws in India. There are. They just aren’t enforced with the regularity common to first world countries. The near total absence of police is surreal. The ubiquity of signs about traffic law and road safety is comic, especially the popularity of signs which appear to be police recruiting posters. Check out this sign at one of the many tolls we encountered.

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It clearly indicates all the things one shouldn’t be doing. Based on the locals’ behavior, it would make more sense to triple its size and state "YOU WILL OBSERVE THIS BEHAVIOR—STAY CLEAR OF OTHER MOTORISTS," which might work if there weren’t so many of them. Let’s be serious. Population density is so high that no current Automatic Emergency Braking system could possibly work in traffic, because no car equipped with it would ever move. What about Blind Spot Monitoring systems? They’d be lighting up and chiming so much, you’d have to disable them. Here’s another fun one. There’s a reason no one’s buying that ad space, and it’s not the condition of the sign.

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