QOTD: Should The Waymo Dude Have a Driver's License?

Anybody who has ever had me as a trackday instructor has heard me repeat it over and over again: driving a car quickly and well is a teachable skill. I can take pretty much any healthy, competent adult and get them to within five or six seconds a lap of what Fernando Alonso could do in, say, a Civic Si. That’s why I fell in love with racing cars; after 20 years of competing in various cycling disciplines and being continually punished for everything from my torso length (too much) to my number of functioning anterior cruciate ligaments (one less than optimal) I was all like, “Wait, you mean that all I have to do is move my hands slowly and not be a wuss about corner entry speed?”

True, at the very upper echelons of the sport there are some non-negotiable requirements for physical size, strength, and endurance. In general, however, driving is pretty easy. My eight-year-old son can flick his kart into a nice drift at 45 miles per hour and then thread through a space that is just inches wider than his vehicle. He thinks hitting a baseball is harder than driving a go-kart, and I agree. His stepmother went from not knowing what a Miata was to winning a race in one across the space of 18 months. You get the idea.

Yet there is a species of creature that is generally unable to match my eight-year-old son or 30-something wife for either courage or competence, and that species is called the “modern millennial male.” In the case of Vahid Kazemi, this species is able to get a doctorate in “computer vision learning” but he can’t operate a RAV4 or whatever without pissing himself.

How do you solve a problem like Vahid?

What I want to suggest here is that ol’ Vahid is exactly what you get when you shelter young men and prevent them from ever “seeing the elephant” in the entire course of their pampered little lives. The same might be true for young ladies, but I don’t know because I’m not a young lady and I don’t have any daughters. That’s beyond my area of expertise. But what I can tell you is that if you get into your 20s without being to handle a plain-Jane passenger car in ordinary traffic, and you are not a native New Yorker, I’m going to make a few assumptions about what kind of man you are.

In my opinion, a man who is old enough to get his PhD should be able to drive a car, ride a motorcycle, understand most basic types of machinery, operate a firearm, calculate a tip, handle a confrontation with another man whether through diplomacy or force as required, and take a woman on a date (if that’s his bag, baby) without finishing the night either alone or under investigation for harassment. I’m not saying that you have to engage in the sort of nature-Zoolander cosplay that made former Jalopnik writer Wes Siler a laughingstock. It’s THE CURRENT YEAR and I doubt that any of us will be forced to subsistence hunt in the near future. But young men should be encouraged to learn and develop the skills they will need to be something other than helpless outside of Park Slope or Mountain View.

Were I Vahid’s father, I’d slap him across the face for deciding that the vast majority of humanity isn’t fit to drive a car just because he can’t handle the task. That way lies the dictatorship of the proletariat. And then I’d slap myself across the face for raising someone like that, because the faults of a son have to be traced to a father. End of rant. And it’s not helpful because I’m not Vahid’s father and I don’t know who Vahid’s father is. So, I repeat, and I implore you, dear reader:

How do you solve a problem like Vahid?