--- title: "When Cars Drive Themselves, What Will We Do With the Extra Time?" date: "2025-05-28" modified: "2025-05-28" authors: - name: "Andrew P. Collins" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/andrew-p-collins" url: "https://www.thedrive.com/news/when-cars-drive-themselves-what-will-we-do-with-the-extra-time" categories: - "Car Tech" - "News" - "Self-Driving Tech" --- # When Cars Drive Themselves, What Will We Do With the Extra Time? ![Dude relaxing while being shuttled around in a self-driving car.]() *\Adobe\* The upshots of self-driving cars for consumers are obvious: safety and convenience. Benefits for corporations aren't hard to figure out, either. Being able to study and influence travel behavior will be great for business, and hey, here's a new captive audience for content and [ads](). So is every car trip going to become a brainrot binge? Or is there something worthwhile we'll be able to do with this newfound "freedom?" This year, more than ever, I feel like I've been living under a siege of posts about the glorious era of automation we're hurtling towards. Just today, *The New York Times* ran a story about the [driverless semi-trucks]() being unleashed on American highways. In one of the first paragraphs, the author describes the scene inside one of those rigs' cabs: "In the back seat of the truck’s sun-drenched cabin, a middle-aged man watched YouTube videos on his phone." Of course. Why be alone with your thoughts when you can watch Mr. Beast's latest capitalist olympics? Meanwhile, drivers in China are [getting fed advertisements through their infotainment screens](), and surely some version of that is inevitable in America, too. ![Automated driving revolution: Mercedes-Benz announces U.S. availability of DRIVE PILOT - the world’s first certified SAE Level 3 system for the U.S. market]() *An instrument-cluster view of Mercedes' Drive Pilot Level 3 autonomous driving system in action. *Mercedes-Benz** The exchange riled up a memory of something Doug DeMuro said to me years ago. He told me he couldn't wait for driverless cars, so he'd have more time to do emails. I don't know if he still feels that way or if he even remembers that conversation, but it's lived in my head rent-free because I find it deeply depressing. The thing about emails, that those of you who don't have office jobs may not know, is that there is *no* end to emails. You could spend your whole commute answering emails, and when you make it to your computer, guess what, there will still be more emails to do. Now, fair play, if your work day starts at 9 a.m., and you can get in the car at 9 a.m. to head to the office, that's a win for productivity. Though it's a little hard to figure we'll have true full self-driving cars before evolving beyond cubicles. The only activity I'd really be interested in giving up driving for is sleep. I live about a two-hour drive from my closest big airport, and when I come off a long flight at 11 p.m., I'd love it if my vehicle could convey me, unsupervised, to my little base in the boondocks. So, all this to ask those of you who scrolled this far: How, exactly, do you see yourself spending newfound "free time" in a car you don't get to control? As my colleague Byron Hurd asked a few years ago, in [trying to save lives with technology, will we die of boredom?]() *Got a tip? Drop us a line at tips@thedrive.com.* ## Author As Executive Editor, Andrew touches everything on the site from daily news coverage to feature stories, sponsored content, product reviews, road testing vehicles, ecommerce, and more. He's held pretty much every role there is to have at an automotive news site and has been with The Drive's publisher Recurrent since 2020. Andrew's a lifetime gearhead and longtime writer with a particularly strong penchant for road trips, off-road adventures, and archaic vehicles. His passions outside of the automotive world include skiing, obsolete video games, and his dog Bramble who occationally helps review cars. ### Author social links [Instagram]() [LinkedIn]()