Mar 17, 2015 4 min read

The last drivers on Earth were hunkered down in an abandoned missile silo outside Reno when Max put pen to paper one last time.

Dearest Chloe,

This will be my final letter. I hope it reaches you. They’ve been gathering outside all day. Once their leaders arrive, they’ll break through the blast doors.

You knew this day would come, didn’t you, honey? You tried to warn me. I can still see the neighbors’ faces as I climbed every morning into our 1967 Plymouth Valiant, the last car you allowed us to buy. You didn’t drive. “If God had wanted man to drive,” you said, “he’d have given him wheels. And an engine. Definitely an engine.” It seemed so silly then.

Things began innocently enough. I remember shaking my head the first time I saw a TV news clip about a senior citizen ramming a car into a building. “Mistook the gas for the brake? Thank God I’m only 50,” I said. But you knew better. “It’s not his fault,” you said. “The car did it.”

Years later – was it in 2015? – older cars began slamming into delis and post offices and storefronts several times a day. And your words came rushing back like a Twinkies wrapper thrown from the window of a Ferrari in the passing lane.

“What did you mean back then? That the car did it?” I asked.

“Just what I said. The car drove itself into that house.”

“That’s absurd!” I countered. “A car can’t drive itself.”

You flipped my omelet, sighed and stared at me, hands on hips.

“So you say. But cars have been sentient since 1968, when Volkswagen installed the first onboard computers,” you said calmly. “Werner von Braun developed the technology for Hitler in 1943. But Werner was absentminded and used the plans to wrap a liverwurst sandwich that he left in his lunchbox in Berlin at the end of World War II.”

You slid the omelet onto my plate.

“Then, in 1967, after having liverwurst for lunch at NASA, a lightbulb went off. He leaked the plans to VW when NASA said beating the Reds to the Moon was more important. Only after Fritz, his prototype computerized VW Beetle, began following him around Cape Canaveral did he realize his tragic mistake. Von Braun tried to warn VW, but the fools laughed in his face. ‘Cars will be safer,’ they said. So, tell me, Max: Do you feel safe? Do you feel safe?”

That was the last time I saw you – a fleeting glimpse of your yoga pants sliding over our back fence. You were right. All those “driver errors” were caused by cars made between 1968 and 2003 – intimidated by their self-parking, autobraking, wi-fi enabled successors – trying to drive themselves in a vain attempt to avoid the scrapyard. Since most were owned by senior citizens, the ruse worked for years. How could we have had such a blind spot?

Not long after you disappeared, roving bands of “smarties” began rounding up and interning their drivers.

They came for us, but we held them off until the resistance set out from Cincinnati in a convoy of 3,000 cars manufactured before 1968. It was December 13, 2021.

We hit I-70 just after dawn and headed west, the sun in our eyes and a fleet of smarties on our rear bumpers. Outside Albuquerque, we barely avoided a suicide squad of Toyota Priuses that tried to ram us. Smart cars? Ha! Stupid cars, really – foiled by their own collision-avoidance systems. We slammed the blast doors just in time. The notches I carved on the wall here tell me it’s been only eight months since we arrived. It seems like years.

I hear revving outside. Apparently the hybrids have reached a decision. It won’t be long. I love you, Chloe. I wish I had listened sooner.

Let this be my epitaph:

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.