a set of handlebars that looked like a steampunk bull’s horns, and that driver would likely need the strength of a steampunk bull to be effective. The vehicle was designed to be balanced when piled high with cannonballs or towing cannon. Laden, the balance would likely have been better, but the whole thing would have been so heavy as to be deeply ungainly. Unladen, it would have been lighter, but with all the weight on the one front wheel, steering would have been a nightmare.
Cugnot not only invented the automobile, he invented lethal understeer.
Understeer, when a car turns less sharply than desired, is what happens with nose-heavy, front-wheel drive cars because they naturally want to go in straight lines. Cugnot’s steam dray was a ridiculous caricature of this design, and as a result, the first test ended up with Cugnot driving it into a wall, which he partially demolished. The second test didn’t fare much better; the truth is that I doubt the steam dray could have been driven effectively. The design was far too unforgiving and difficult and, what’s more, nobody had any idea how to drive.
The next attempt at an automobile was built by William Murdoch in 1784 and seemed to recognize the layout issues that Cugnot’s vehicle had, and pretty much corrected them. Too bad it only existed as a subscale working model. If it had been built to human scale, it’s likely it would have been far more drivable than the Cugnot car.
In 1801, the invent-cars project was renewed with the help of a Cornish man named Richard Trevithick who built a crude but full-scale test vehicle, the Puffing Devil. In 1803, he built a much more realized vehicle, arguably the very first passenger car designed to be a passenger automobile from the start, the London Steam Carriage.
The Puffing Devil was a proof-of-concept test of locomotion; it didn’t really have any steering mechanism, or a real passenger compartment. It wasn’t “driven” in the sense we understand driving today, which is why we should focus on the London Steam Carriage, which had an actual steering mechanism and a place for passengers. It was a real car, and as such could be driven. Its steam engine was set low in the tall chassis and toward the rear, controlling the rear wheels. A lone steering wheel up front was turned via a simple tiller. It was a basic design, but it was effective. The center of gravity was pretty low for such a tall vehicle and the steering mechanism worked, even if it required two people—one to stoke and manage the engine at the rear, and one to steer up front.
This division of labor necessitated communication between the two parties—as if you, while driving, had to yell at your feet to get off the gas pedal and get on the brake. Even with the task of driving divided between two people—who didn’t know how weird that would one day seem because nobody had ever done this before—the act of driving proved difficult.
To Trevithick and his team’s credit, they did manage to drive it a bit on the first try, about 10 miles, at speeds between 4 and 9 mph, but the next night they managed to wreck it.
There is a pretty good recounting of the wreck in the Life of Richard Trevithick: With an Account of His Inventions, Volume 1.1
They kept going on for four or five miles, and sometimes at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour. I was steering, and Captain Trevithick and some one else were attending to the engine. . . . She was going along five or six miles an hour, and Captain Dick called out, “Put the helm down, John!” and before I could tell what was up, Captain Dick’s foot was upon the steering-wheel handle, and we were tearing down six or seven yards of railing from a garden wall. A person put his head from a window, and called out, “What the devil are you doing there! What the devil is that thing!”
What we see here is that people were starting to learn just how much attention and processing is involved in driving, something horses have understood for centuries. A horse pulling a carriage the same size as this 1803 car would not have made this mistake. From what the accident reports state, it looks like the driver misjudged the distance to the garden fences and sideswiped them. It’s a pretty rookie mistake, but, to be fair, the driver of that steam carriage had more driving experience than anyone else on earth.
I mean, if you really think about what was being asked of these early, early drivers, the demands were decidedly nontrivial. For the first time, a vehicle moving at speeds significantly faster than a walking pace had to be controlled through city streets. This means that people had to make many new and unexpected decisions at a pace greater than they’d been used to.
The vehicle itself was tall and ungainly, with extremely skinny, metal-clad wheels that likely had very poor grip. Wheels like these over cobblestone or macadamized streets wouldn’t be easy for a modern driver with decades of experience, let alone people new to the fundamental concept of motorized motion. Everything must have felt unfamiliar and strange; the single-wheel steering couldn’t have been that confidence inspiring, and understanding how to follow the track of a road is the sort of thing that’s only really learned by visceral, physical experience. It comes quickly, but it’s not necessarily instant, and in a vehicle as ungainly as the London Steam Carriage, there’s a lot about how the car feels and behaves on the road that has to be learned.
All of this is to say that I’m not the least bit surprised that the first automobile drive of any length ended up in a wreck.
Keep in mind that these early cars even predate trains, which diverged from the automobile evolutionary line the year after the London Steam Carriage, with Trevithick’s rail locomotive of 1804. The fact that Trevithick, who was part of the second automobile wreck in human history, decided to eliminate most of the driving skill required by running his automobile on rails, is telling. Driving, even though it has become second nature to most of us, isn’t easy.
Railroads are a form of mechanical driving semi-automation; the rails take over the steering, navigation, and lane-keeping duties of a vehicle, a significant portion of the driving task. We went from the semiautonomy of animal power to a brief flirtation with entirely manual driving, then quickly retreated to a new, mechanized form of partial autonomous travel.
Sure, there were plenty of other reasons why railroads became the first widely used system of mechanized travel—poor road networks, economies of scale, centralized ownership, and so on—but the fact that no one knew how to drive is an underappreciated factor.
I know it feels like we’re on the fringes of a revolution in driving, where we’re finally free to relinquish control over to a competent, well-trained machine, but the truth is that we’re really just going back to where we’ve been throughout most of history, just in a much more technologically refined way. It is full human control of a body- and ability-enhancing prosthetic—a car—that’s the really fascinating development, and it’s possible that this past century or so of widespread driving may be the anomaly.
This idea that a human-driven car is essentially a body- and ability-enhancing prosthetic is a concept that’s especially important to reflect on, now that we’re on the verge of transitioning to a new paradigm of automotive transport. The core of this idea is illustrative of what makes human driving so special, and one aspect of what we may stand to lose in an all- (or nearly all-) autonomous era.
Just think about how driving works right now: you get into a vehicle, and using physical motions of your body, you cause it to move, steer, stop, everything. Good drivers know how the car is balanced and gripping and moving on a gut level. They don’t assess these things by looking at the instruments and doing bursts of math in their heads, they feel it in the same way they feel their body’s motion and balance. The same goes for how people who know their cars really well can understand how their cars are performing and operating by feel as well. As you and a car grow used to each other, you begin to learn how it sounds and smells and performs and behaves, and when those behaviors or smells or sounds change, you immediately pick up on that and become aware that something may be amiss.
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