From the passenger’s perspective, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft offer a preview of what self-driving cars are supposed to deliver. You tap the button and summon a vehicle, and it takes you to your pre-entered destination. Yes, there’s a person in there, but now you can opt for a “quiet” ride, silencing the human who just happens to be sitting in the driver’s seat.

In New York City alone, more than than 620,000 daily trips are made like this. And, from what researchers have observed, the external impacts of this surge also hint at what the autonomous future has in store. In exchange for seamless, low-cost, car-based transport, cities across the U.S. are seeing congestion worsening, public transit ridership dipping, and more vehicle-miles wearing down roads—some of the worst-case stuff that futurists predict for when hailing a robo-car is even cheaper and easier.

It was still dark on a Friday morning in November when a California Highway Patrol officer started following a Tesla Model S on Route 101 between the San Francisco International Airport and Palo Alto. The gray sedan was going 70 miles per hour with a turn signal blinking, cruising past multiple exits. The officer pulled up alongside and saw the driver in a head-slumped posture. Lights and sirens failed to rouse him. The car, the officer guessed, was driving itself under the control of what Tesla calls Autopilot.

Every Tesla is equipped with hardware that the automaker says will enable its vehicles to be capable of driving themselves on entire trips, from parking space to parking space, with no input from the driver. At the moment, the company limits its cars to a system that can guide them from on-ramp to off-ramp on highways. The system is smart enough, it seems, to keep the Tesla driving safely even with a seemingly incapacitated driver, but not yet smart enough to obey police sirens and pull over.

Authorities say a Tesla driver, who said he thought his car was in Autopilot mode, crashed into the back of a firetruck in San Jose.

The California Highway Patrol says the Tesla rear-ended a fire engine that was stopped with its emergency lights activated along US-101 around 1 a.m. Saturday.

Autonomous vehicles are driving new legislation across the nation and pilot tests are being rolled out. But for many citizens and legislators, the learning curve for autonomous vehicles (AVs) may still be quite steep and the desire to learn deep.