Vella admits that weaning America off its “long-standing romance with its cars” will be a tough chore. But it is apparently a worthy task because Vella, like millions of other Americans, has been a victim of a human-driven-car accident. So he knows firsthand just how dangerous letting humans drive can be. His whining rhetoric is reminiscent of that of the anti-gun lobby, who similarly maintain that the only thing preventing us from saving lives is an irrational and outdated emotional attachment.

This is pat leftist thinking: “Individuals want X. Individuals are incapable of doing X efficiently by themselves. Therefore X should be provided for them by experts.” The experts are generally the government, often the academics, but never the individual. They know which doctor you should see, which operations your insurance should cover, which schools your kids should attend, and what the curricula should be. Think of then-candidate Obama’s infamous “Life of Julia”: Everything is taken care of for Julia, the perpetual child of leftist America, so that she isn’t bothered with the tedious business of making her own decisions, which would be inefficient and probably wrong.

Vella says that “contrarians” — apparently the automotive equivalent of global-warming “deniers” — often raise the vexed question of how it can be ethically acceptable to have a car make life-and-death choices: For example, to allow a car to choose between killing a dozen bystanders in the road or instead swerving and killing its lone occupant. Rather than attempting an answer, or even an examination of this serious subject, Vella writes that “these and plenty of other objections will provide ammunition as America’s libertarian id struggles to hold on to the keys.” No doubt the same way we struggle to hold on to God and guns.