Horseless carriages were once a lot like driverless cars. What can history teach us?

Time for the horses to come back in style. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
"Driverless taxicabs, almost certainly coming to a city near you, have freaked out passengers in San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin over the past year. Some documented their experiences on TikTok.

Octogenarians, startled by the empty front seats during a ride to a coffee shop in Phoenix, for example, and a rider named Alex Miller who cracked jokes through his first Waymo trip last spring. "Oh, we're making a left hand turn without using a left turn lane," he observed. "That was ... interesting."

The nervous laughter of anxious TikTokers reminds historian Victor McFarland of the pedestrians who yelled "Get a horse" to hapless motorists in the 1910s. But McFarland, who teaches at the University of Missouri, says the newfangled beasts known as automobiles were more threatening and unfamiliar to people a century ago than driverless cars are to us now.

"Automobiles were frightening to a lot of people at first," he says. "The early automobiles were noisy. They were dangerous. They had no seatbelts. They ran over pedestrians. ""...