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If you’ve listened closely to my lyrics, especially throughout the Bee Mann project, you’ve probably caught a few Tesla references sprinkled through them. Riding in my Tesla. My bulletproof Tesla. A baddie in the front seat of my Tesla, coming home with me after our night out… If you haven’t picked up on it yet, here’s the funny part. The closer I get to fifty, the more futuristic my lyrics seem to become. Apparently, I’m getting older and somehow traveling further into the future. The Bee Mann trilogy is probably the clearest evidence of that. There’s real life buried throughout that universe, and a sharp listener will probably recognize the pieces that are actually me.
And yet, much of Bee Mann’s musicology deliberately exists in a heightened, technologically advanced, speculative world. That’s part of what attracts me to Tesla as a symbol. Not merely the vehicle. The idea of the future. Which brings me to something about myself that probably disappeared from public view a long time ago. I love technology. I’ve always been the guy who owned the latest gadgets and stayed updated on what was coming next. That side of me faded into the background during my Canadian years. That’s because I became consumed with other things I loved while living there: making music, writing books, networking, and performing in theatre.
People who knew me then probably saw an independent artist or an author. They probably never saw the tech nut underneath. Before Canada, I took almost a ten-year hiatus from being an artist. Technology was one of my biggest infatuations during that period. That would be my first break from music. Before that, in the nineties, I was a freestyle and battle rapper. Then, between 1997 and 2006, I stepped away from being that artist. I went to college. Bought a home. Lived a completely different life. I had some genuinely cool jobs during that stretch, too. Ones I still romanticize today. But what really fascinated me was the world of gadgets, robotics, and electronics.
Your boy was on all the newest things. I wanted to know how they worked. More importantly, I wanted to know what was coming after them. The possibility that machines would eventually do things we considered exclusively human fascinated me long before anybody was talking to AI over breakfast. Then I moved to Canada, and the artist came roaring back. Music. Books. Theatre. Writing. Performing. Eventually, those things consumed me so completely that the tech guy became less visible. But he never disappeared. This probably explains why Elon Musk and Tesla caught my attention, especially when the conversation started moving toward autonomous driving.
Self-driving technology fascinates me for one very particular reason. I am a road trip kind of guy. Some say I have runaway blood. In my twenties, if there was a road trip to take, I took it. Sometimes with a friend. Other times alone. Driving to a new city, staying in a roadside motel, seeing parts of the world I hadn’t seen before. That was the thrill. Before Canada, I drove up and down the I-95 corridor and the New Jersey Turnpike more times than I could count. New York. Philadelphia. Connecticut. Massachusetts. Sometimes the destination mattered. Other times, getting there was half the point. I had an unreleased song that I played a lot. And then you go and you go, you goooo!
By 2005, the only states I had not visited were Hawaii and Alaska. Once I relocated to Canada, I kept it going. Toronto to New Jersey. Toronto to Ottawa. Montreal. Kingston. Quebec. Back across the border. Then back again. My twenties and thirties were spent behind the wheel, and some of those adventures were breathtaking. I became an explorer in my Ford Explorer. Yeah. I know. I had to write that. Your boy had two Explorers. There was something wonderfully liberating about having a full tank, some money for a motel room, a stack of CDs, and somewhere I hadn’t been before. The motel became part of the adventure. So did the gas station. So did finding somewhere to eat dinner.
Fried chicken wings and Arizona Iced Tea? Discovering a small town that had its own little bar, late-night pickup scene? That was a version of freedom in America that I associated almost completely with having a car and going wherever. But driving wasn’t always so epic. There was another reality on America’s highways as a Black man in a fairly nice car… Police… Mean ones too. Sometimes, I probably wasn’t helping matters with my music being super loud. That Jay-Z, Nas, Tupac, Biggie, Snoop Dogg, or whoever at the time, through a good sound system. I wasn’t exactly trying to disappear into traffic. Especially in my twenties and thirties. And I used to love that shit.
Regarding the police, there were also encounters where I knew exactly what I felt was happening. The following. The stops. The questions. The tickets. The feeling that somebody had already decided something about me before reaching my window. Whether every encounter was actually about race is impossible for me to know. But when such occurrences happened often enough, they started changing the emotional relationship I had with driving. Even the old ritual of having a beautiful woman in the passenger seat eventually lost some of its magic. Partly because I got older. And partly because the women got their own damn cars. The whole game changed.
That fantasy of wooing a good friend with my new ride, the right burnt CD, and the right destination didn’t hit the same anymore. Later on, that Toronto-to-New-Jersey run became less of an adventure and more of an endurance test. Somewhere along the way, I realized something. I still loved going places. I just didn’t love driving there anymore. Then I moved to Europe and turned forty. If North America taught me to love the automobile, Europe gradually cured me of needing one. Cobblestones. Narrow streets. Bicycles appearing from dimensions I didn’t know existed. Roads winding through cities designed several centuries before anybody imagined a Cadillac.
Belgium had parking spaces apparently engineered for Mini Coopers. Good luck finding a place to park a full-size American SUV in Brussels. Then the roundabouts. Good Lord, the roundabouts. I have a Tesla now. And this year, in my late forties, I gave the great road trip another shot. We left Berlin and worked our way south, stopping overnight through some of the major cities. We continued through Austria and eventually into Italy, going as far south as Rome before turning around and making the journey home. It was magnificent. The cities. Hotels. Restaurants. Museums. Bars. People. Changing landscapes. All of it reminded me why I fell in love with road trips.
Give me a lively city I haven’t explored, a happening nightlife, somewhere interesting to sleep, great restaurants, museums, and another destination waiting tomorrow, and apparently that part of me is still very much alive. Hey, I’m a dancer. There was only one problem. I got tired of driving the damn car. Somewhere during that trip, I kept thinking about self-driving technology. Not cruise control. Or lane assistance. Not a car helping me drive. I wanted the machine to take over. Yeah, I wanted to look out the window. Read something. Watch a movie properly. Write a paragraph. Answer an email. Talk to whoever was sitting beside me. Or do absolutely nothing but sleep.
That’s when I realized my relationship with the automobile had fundamentally changed.
Then I saw Tesla’s Cybercab. And daymn!
In September 2026, Tesla (or Elon Musk) started putting actual passengers into Cybercabs. It is in limited areas of Austin, Texas. This isn’t simply another Tesla with more autonomous features. The thing has only two seats. Brake pedal? Nope. No steering wheel. No accelerator pedal. You aren’t supposed to drive this thing. That’s the point. My first reaction was… It was… That’s what I’ve been waiting for! Because suddenly the automobile stops waiting for me to operate it. I find that incredibly sexy. For most of my life, the automobile represented control. You had to handle the machine. Horsepower. Attentiveness. Acceleration. The steering wheel itself was part of the mythology.
Particularly for us men, there was something about sitting behind that wheel that communicated status or masculinity. I understand that fantasy because I lived it. Cadillac DeVille. Lincoln SUV etc. Since moving to Germany, a Volkswagen, a Jeep, a Peugeot, and eventually a Tesla. I love cars. Still do. But maybe technology is about to change what transportation in luxury means. Maybe the ultimate luxury isn’t you controlling the machine. Perhaps the ultimate luxury is not having to. That’s what fascinates me about the Cybercab. Tesla removed the reason around which our relationship with the automobile has been organized for more than a century.
The steering wheel. That sounds like a common thing until you sit where the driver used to sit and realize there is no driver.. Now we’re talking about something else entirely. These days, I barely drive. Between all the writing, I rarely go out as much as I used to. When I do, you’ll frequently find me on a bus or train with headphones or AirPods in, looking like someone who somehow woke up with children, responsibilities, and a lot more books than he planned on writing. And you know what? I like it. It helps me think. Or watch the news. I can gaze at the city. I don’t have to worry about traffic, parking, tickets, or somebody flashing blue lights behind me. Thank the Lord!
These days, I find myself dreaming more about buying my kids their first cars than buying another one for myself. But I haven’t stopped wanting to explore. That’s the distinction. Give me Berlin tonight and Prague tomorrow. Vienna after that. Budapest. Or point me back toward Italy or Portugal. Let me spend two nights, find a restaurant, walk through a museum, hear some music (Bee Mann), meet some interesting mama, wake up, and move on to the next city. I still have my US driver’s licence and will never stop loving classic cars. But I’ve stopped enjoying the wheel. That might be the simplest explanation for why the Cybercab makes so much sense to me.
That Shit Eater is about to have her work cut out, tracking me down. If Europe ever adopts fully autonomous cars properly, I would be thrilled to have something like that as my personal ride. Punch in the destination and let the technology handle the rest. No more stress behind the wheel. Or worrying about my license. No traffic tickets. No driving twelve hours and then being too exhausted to enjoy where I just arrived. Of course, I live in Germany. Europe has a fascinating relationship with technological disruption. America sometimes releases the future and asks questions afterward. Europe forms a committee. Then a working group. Then a regulatory framework.
The Germans are so anal, they just might set up another committee to determine whether the first committee respected the framework. I’m exaggerating. Slightly. But no. I shouldn’t pretend Europe is standing still either. Germany is among the European countries pushing coordinated autonomous-vehicle testing. Supervised versions of Tesla’s self-driving technology have been moving through the European regulatory process. The future isn’t absent here. We just need to avoid a war. Europe likes negotiating with the future before allowing it anywhere. And supervised driving isn’t my dream anyway. I don’t want the car to help me drive. I want to retire from driving.
There’s another interesting part of the Cybercab story that I should state correctly. Tesla isn’t presently selling it like an ordinary personal car. The Cybercab is being deployed around the company’s Robotaxi idea. That makes me wonder whether I’m still thinking about this through an old paradigm. Maybe the next revolution isn’t what car do I own? Maybe it’s why do I need to own the car at all? That is a much bigger cultural shift. For somebody who once associated freedom with having a car sitting outside ready to go wherever I wanted, I find myself strangely comfortable with the idea. Call the technology. Get in. Tell it where I’m going. Put on a movie. Road head. Arrive.
Maybe the automobile becomes less possession and more mobility. Less identity and more infrastructure. Less machine and more service. Although, don’t get carried away. I’m not suddenly enlightened. There are still automobiles capable of making me behave irrationally. Right now, one of them is the Aurus Senat. Yes. The Russian limousine. Don’t ask. I have absolutely no rational explanation for why a man living in Berlin needs a giant Russian luxury sedan. Much less the drop-top version I’ve imagined owning for a while. There is no practical argument. I simply want one. So maybe the old me isn’t completely gone. I am simply not going to live off the grid just yet.
There are the Chinese manufacturers. Companies like BYD have become impossible to ignore. The Chinese are moving aggressively in electric vehicles, software and automotive technology. That means Tesla certainly won’t have the future to itself. I like that. Competition means everybody has to keep inventing. And competition tends to make the future arrive faster. Maybe that’s ultimately why seeing the Cybercab affected me the way it did. It connected two versions of myself that I hadn’t realized belonged in the same story. The twenty-something driving the I-95 with the music too loud. And the almost-fifty-year-old sitting in Berlin imagining a self-driving car.
One thought freedom meant driving wherever he wanted. The other thinks freedom might mean being driven wherever he wants. Neither one stopped loving movement. Neither one stopped wanting to see what was around the next corner. The technology changed. The man changed. And somewhere between the New Jersey Turnpike, Toronto’s 407, Berlin 111, and those highways down to Rome, maybe my definition of freedom changed too. So if the day eventually comes when I can summon my own Cybercab in Berlin, throw a bag in the back and tell it, “Rome,” I’m definitely going. No steering wheel. No pedals. Or traffic stress. No fighting the road for twelve hours.
Just me, some music, the passing landscape, and another city waiting at the other end. Maybe that’s what I actually wanted all along. Not the car. Nor the wheel. Not even the road.
The freedom to go. Damn. I think I’m ready for the future.
