Staff Correspondent Jesse Snyder, who lives near Albuquerque, N.M., imagines life out West in the autonomous era. "So you'd be up to some real rock crawling ... old school?" The challenge in my son's voice was unmistakable. Clearly, I'd spouted off once too often about four-wheeling back when "real men" drove "manually." Too late to back out now. I call out, "Honey, Brandon's taking us to Moab next week." "Great, we haven't been for years," Kathryn replies. Unfashionably, our family still prefers driving. That is, driving the vehicle ourselves. When Brandon arrives at our New Mexico home from Houston, he admits putting his AV on full auto through West Texas so he could text his field crews in Montana and South Dakota. "Off roads, they don't have AV," he said. "I can't ask them to talk and drive. Company policy."
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