The Trial of the Driverless Car

March 26, 2026·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

A blind Bostonian with Usher syndrome on why he's saving for an autonomous car: 'I want that feeling back.'

The starting point is a driver. The host sets this second story beside the first, except the driver changing this time is human. Abdi Aziz has driven professionally for 30 years, through limo service, taxi work, and airport fares in Boston. Then Uber shows up at Logan with a future-sounding pitch: same job, different machine. It changes his life. Years later, another West Coast tech company brings another driver, this one from Waymo. The room is already tense. Drivers hear the technology as a direct threat to work they built their lives around. Matt Walsh is easy for Boston politics to reject: an outsider from a tech company worth $126 billion. Still, the safety claim does not go away. If Waymo is right that its driver is 80% safer, some crashes may be avoidable. Human drivers lose focus, check phones, bring private emotions onto public roads, and sometimes hurt people without meaning to. Emily Malterre says she became less skeptical after learning more, partly because she has known people killed in car crashes. The councilor does not seem interested. The episode stays with the hard part: jobs matter, safety matters, and nobody gets an easy answer.

As heard by us

A sharp Boston story about driverless cars, worker anxiety, and the politics behind promises of safer roads.

Search Engine puts a human driver at the center of the driverless car debate. Abdi Aziz has spent decades driving in Boston, long enough to remember when taxi work felt like a real career and when Uber first showed up at Logan with an app, a phone, and a promise that drivers…

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Why you'd press play

When self-driving cars meet Boston taxi history, you get the human cost first.

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