Tesla’s self-driving taxis finally hit the streets of Austin a week ago. As expected, the internet had opinions.

Nothing new there. Still, it was a milestone for Tesla.

It put the spotlight back on the company and its promise of full self-driving (FSD) cars, rather than Elon Musk’s extracurriculars.

I’ve spent the last five years researching self-driving vehicles. And I’ve written before about how FSD will change the world.

But it stopped being theoretical for me about eight weeks ago.

I bought a Tesla with FSD, and it changed my life. I started using it on real roads, during real commutes, with my kids in the backseat.

That’s when it sank in that self-driving cars aren’t some far-away technology. It’s here, it’s real, and it’s going to change your life soon — if it hasn’t already.

The Future of Driving Is Here

Let me start by saying that I have never been much of a car guy.

Sure, we always had cars growing up, but they were just a means to an end. We were poor, and it was just my mom and me. So “car culture” was not part of my life.

I spent my young adulthood living in Philadelphia and Manhattan, so I didn’t really need to own a car. Even when I did, I didn’t think much about it. Again, it was a means to an end.

That all began to change in 2019 after my colleague Whitney Tilson and I attended the Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York City.

We watched a presentation about electric and autonomous vehicles and how they would shape the future. (You can watch that presentation here if you’re interested.)

Both Whitney and I were floored by the presentation. That’s when I began researching electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Whitney and I published a research report in February 2020, going over the investment opportunity in EVs and AVs.

At the time, most experts thought AVs were a pipe dream and still decades away. But my research said they could be a reality in just a few years.

Once they were widely available, they would absolutely change the world. Well, here we are in 2025 — and that reality is today.

A couple of months ago, my girlfriend and I decided that we needed another car. So for the first time in half a decade, I began to think about what to buy.

I didn’t have any strong opinions (positive or negative) on owning an EV. But everyone I knew who owned a Tesla absolutely loved them, so I was interested.

Tesla prices have dropped a lot over the last few years. Partially because Elon pushed prices down to drive market share, and then due to the controversy surrounding his political involvement.

As a result, Teslas have become absolute bargains. So we went out and bought a used 2024 Tesla Model Y.

We did the entire process online, which took about 20 minutes. Yes, 20 minutes — less time than it takes me to fill out my kids’ summer camp forms.

I drove down and picked up the car with my two young girls. We were impressed with the car’s power. We brought it home and settled in to start our new life with the Tesla.

Our “Pipe Dream” Came True

To be completely honest, I didn’t even think about the self-driving component whatsoever during the entire process.

About three days after bringing it home, I remembered that Tesla had rolled out the FSD feature. A friend of mine who has owned Teslas for a decade had been raving about it last year.

So I went out one morning to try it out. And I must admit, I was pretty scared.

I was headed to my gym, which is about 15 minutes away. It was early in the morning. And I live in a small town, so it felt like a safe environment to give it a whirl.

On the giant display in the car, I input the address of my gym and hit the button. It backed out of my driveway and then slowly backed into my street and down to the corner.

A car moving by itself felt so…unnatural.

I got to an intersection, and my pulse really quickened. This is a much busier country road, and sometimes people rip down it at 50 miles per hour.

The car took a pause. It sensed that no cars were coming and made a smooth left turn onto the road.

As it accelerated to 35 miles per hour down the curvy country road, I was simply amazed. Butterflies in my stomach, and my mind was completely blown.

That morning, I let the car drive all the way to the gym and back. Not ONCE did I touch the steering wheel or any control for the entire ride.

The “pipe dream” that Whitney and I had written about five years earlier was now a reality, sitting in my garage.

I continued to use the feature over the next few weeks, partially out of curiosity and partly out of convenience.

The big test was a trip my 8-year-old daughter Nava and I had to take to New Jersey for a meeting and then a Yankees game.

Driving down there can be brutal, so I was interested to see how FSD would handle it. We got in the car, set the destination in northern New Jersey, and let it go.

I only touched the steering wheel twice during the entire two-and-a-half-hour drive, so we could get some water and go to the bathroom.

This drive was LIFE CHANGING. It got me thinking…

If you could let a car drive you for this mind-numbing and stressful commute, why would you ever do it yourself?

Sure, you still need to pay attention to the road in the Tesla (it is “supervised” self-driving). You can’t be on your phone or anything.

But the stress levels were a fraction of what they normally would have been.

It ran through my mind that in the future, our children and grandchildren will laugh at us for driving our own cars.

“You used to drive the car yourself everywhere? Why… and it isn’t that dangerous?”

Driving your own car will be seen as obsolete, going down in the history books alongside print newspapers and landlines.

And that could happen much sooner than you think.

Over the next 18 months, millions of people will go through the same shift I just did.

And when they do, everything about how we move, commute, and think about cars will start to change forever.