For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point?

Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021. The self-driving car is simultaneously a pipe dream and sort of, kind of the reality of many Americans. Waymo, a robotaxi company owned by Alphabet, is now providing 100,000 rides a week across a handful of U.S. cities. Just last week, Tesla announced its own robotaxi, the Cybercab, in dramatic fashion. Still, the fact remains: If you are in the driver’s seat of a car and out on the road nearly anywhere in America, you are responsible for the car, and you have to pay attention. My dad’s self-driving fantasy likely remains far away.

But driving is already changing. Normal cars—cars that are not considered fancy or experimental and strange—now come with advanced autonomous features. Some can park themselves. You can ask your electric Hummer to “crab walk” into or out of a tight corner that you can’t navigate yourself. It seems that if you are on a bad date and happen to be sitting on a restaurant patio not too far from where you parked your Hyundai Tucson SEL, you can press a button to make it pull up beside you on the street, getaway-car style. It’s still hard to imagine a time when no one needs to drive themselves anywhere, but that’s not the case with parallel parking. We might be a generation away from new drivers who never learn to parallel park at all.

It makes sense that the task would be innovated away. Parallel parking is a source of anxiety and humiliation: David Letterman once pranked a bunch of teenagers by asking them to try to parallel park in Midtown Manhattan, which went just as hilariously poorly as you might expect. Parallel parking isn’t as dangerous as, say, merging onto the highway or navigating a roundabout, but it’s a big source of fear for drivers—hence a Volkswagen ad campaign in which the company made posters for a fake horror movie called The Parallel Park. And then it’s a source of pride. Perfectly executed parking jobs are worthy of photographs and public bragging. My first parallel park in Brooklyn on the day I moved there at 21 was flawless. I didn’t know about alternate-side parking, so I ultimately was ticketed and compelled to pay $45 for the memory, but it was worth it.

Whether or not you live in a place where you have to parallel park often, you should know how to do it. At some point, you will at least need to be able to handle a car and its angles and blind spots and existence in physical space well enough to do something like it. But this is an “eat your vegetables” thing to say. So, I thought, the best people to look at in order to guess how long we have until parallel parking is an extinct art might be the people who don’t already have a driver’s license. According to some reports, Gen Z doesn’t want to learn how to drive—“I’ll call an Uber or 911,” one young woman told The Washington Post. Those who do want to learn have to do so in a weird transitional moment in which we are still pretending that parallel parking is something a human must do, even though it isn’t, a lot of the time.

I talked with some longtime driving-school instructors who spoke about self-parking features the way that high-school English teachers talk about ChatGPT. The kids are relying on them to their detriment, and it’s hard to get them to form good habits, said Brian Posada, an instructor at the Chicago-based Entourage Driving School (not named after the HBO show, he said). “I’ve got some students who are really rich,” he told me. As soon as they get their permits, their parents buy them Teslas or other fancy cars that can self-park. Even if he teaches them how to parallel park properly, they will not practice in their own time. “They get lazy,” he told me.

Parallel parking isn’t part of the driver’s-license exam in California, though Mike Thomas still teaches it at his AllGood Driving School. His existential dread is that he will one day be less like an educator and more like the person who teaches you how to use your iPhone. He tells teens not to rely on the newfangled tools or else they will not really know how to drive, but he doesn’t know whether they actually buy in. “It’s hard to get into the minds of teenagers,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how good teenagers are at telling people what they want to hear.” Both instructors told me, more or less, that although they can teach any teen to parallel park, they have little faith that these new drivers will keep up the skill or that they will try on their own.

Teens are betting, maybe correctly, that they soon may never have to parallel park at all. Already, if you live in Austin or San Francisco and want to avoid parallel parking downtown, you can order an Uber and be picked up by a driverless Waymo. But autonomous parking is much simpler to pull off than fully autonomous driving. When I pushed Greg Stevens, the former chief engineer of driver-assistance features at Ford, to give me an estimate of when nobody will have to drive themselves anywhere anymore, he would not say 2035 or 2050 or anything else. He said he would not guess.

“The horizon keeps receding,” he told me. Stevens now leads research at the University of Michigan’s Mcity, a huge testing facility for autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles. Most driving, he said—99.9 percent—is “really boring and repetitive and easy to automate.” But in the final .1 percent, there are edge cases: “things that happen that are very rare, but when they happen they’re very significant.” That’s a teen whipping an egg at your windshield, a mattress falling off the back of a truck, a weird patch of gravel, or whatever else. “Those are hard to encapsulate completely,” he said, “because there’s an infinite number of those types of scenarios that could happen.”

In many ways, people are still resisting the end of driving. One guy in Manhattan is agitating for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing human beings the “right to drive,” if they so choose, in our autonomous-vehicle future. It can be hard to predict whether people will want to use new features, Stevens told me: Some cars can now change lanes for you, if you let them, which people are scared to do. Most can try to keep you in your lane, but some people hate this a lot. And for now, self-driving cars are just not that much more pleasant to use than regular cars. On the highway, the car tracks your gaze and head position to make sure your eyes stay on the road the entire time—arguably more depressing and mind-numbing than regular highway driving.

Many people don’t want a self-parking car, which is why Ford has recently paused plans to put the feature in all new vehicles. I hate driving because it’s dangerous, but I am good at parallel parking, and I’m not ready to see it go. It’s the only aspect of operating a vehicle for which I have any talent. I don’t want to ease into a tight spot without the thrill of feeling competent. Parallel parking is arguably the hardest part of driving, but succeeding at it is the most gratifying.

If parallel parking persists for the simple reason that Americans don’t want to give it up, fully self-driving cars may have little hope. A country in which nobody has to change lanes on a six-lane highway or park on their own is a better country, objectively. I also spoke with Nicholas Giudice, a spatial-computing professor at the University of Maine who is working on autonomous vehicles with respect to “driving-limited populations” such as people with visual impairments or older adults. Giudice is legally blind and can’t currently drive a car. He said he would get in the first totally self-driving car anybody offered him: “If you tell me there’s one outside of my lab, I’ll hop into it now.”

Conventional parallel parking—sweating, straining, tapping the bumper of the car in front of you, finally getting the angle right on the 40th try—won’t have to disappear, but it could become part of a subculture one day, Giudice said. There will be driving clubs or special recreational driving tracks. Maybe there will be certain lanes on the highway where it would be allowed, at least for a while. “You can’t have 95 percent autonomous vehicles and a couple of yahoos driving around manually,” he said. “It will just be too dangerous.”

Am I a yahoo for still wanting to parallel park? I can mollify myself with a fantasy of parallel parking as not a chore but a fun little game to play in a closed environment. I can picture it next to the mini-golf and the batting cages at one of those multipurpose “family fun” centers. There’s one near my parents’ house where you can already ride a fake motorcycle and shoot a fake gun. My dad could drive me there with his feet up and a ball game on.

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Mariam was 12 years old when a relative sold her into a marriage with a 40-year-old soldier in the Taliban, who was already married. She was repeatedly sexually and physically assaulted. By the time she was 19, she had four children. Mariam’s story is not unusual; her four sisters each had similar experiences, as have countless other Afghan women. I know this all too well—I was born in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s first regime, and left the country when the United States withdrew its troops in 2021. I have friends who still live there. (Mariam is not a real name; like many of the women I spoke with for this story, this person asked me to protect her identity for fear of retribution.)

The events of recent years have been a terrible form of whiplash. After the 2001 U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban and a democratic government was established, new women’s-rights advocacy groups proliferated. With their help, Mariam was eventually able to leave the marriage. Millions of other Afghan women experienced new freedoms in those years. The government reopened the schools and universities for women. Under the new constitution, women were guaranteed the right to work, vote, and participate in public life. The Ministry of Women was created to protect these rights. Now, though, Mariam is once again living under a Taliban regime, this time with even more oppressive rules. “Every morning we are waking up with a new Taliban rule limiting us in every way they could; rules for our body, hair, education, and now our voices,” Mariam told me. “If the Taliban continues, Afghanistan will soon become a graveyard for women and young girls, and the world will just watch.”

[Ian Fritz: What I learned while eavesdropping on the Taliban]

The question Mariam and other Afghan women are now asking is whether the international community will come to their aid once again. In August, the Taliban issued a 114-page, 35-article set of restrictive laws, approved by their supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. The document takes many basic freedoms away from the country’s women, prohibiting them from singing publicly or looking at men other than their husband and relatives, and requiring them to cover their bodies and faces in public. Many of these restrictions have been enforced since the Taliban took control of the government in August 2021, but until now, they were not the official law.

For weeks, there was little sign that the international community would step in. But last month, in a historic move, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands filed a case against the Taliban under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This case will take the Taliban to the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. It is the first time that a group of countries has taken another nation to the ICJ for CEDAW violations. The Taliban now has six months to respond to the complaint. For the Afghan women I spoke with, the new case is an important step toward justice. “This is great progress to end gender apartheid and persecution,” said Muhiba Ruzbehan, 46, who lived under the first Taliban regime and now works in medicine in London. Many of them consider the mere filing of the lawsuit an achievement, but what they want is a favorable ruling from the International Court of Justice. Until then, a lawsuit is just a lot of paper.

For many who lived during the Taliban’s first regime, the newly instated laws are frightening flashbacks to the brutal rules of the late ’90s. Back then, Ruzbehan served as a doctor’s assistant in a Taliban military hospital. She saw women whose hands had been cut off, brought in for treatment by Taliban commanders proud of their abuse. She saw women who had been flogged and seriously injured for merely speaking with a man. She saw bodies of women who had been stoned to death for adultery. “I am deeply heartbroken and disappointed to see the Taliban’s second term is even more radical compared to their first regime,” she told me.

[From the September 2022 issue: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

Younger women who don’t remember the earlier regime are now experiencing a constrained life they had long heard about from their mother and grandmothers. I spoke with Salehi, 27, who is from Badakhshan, the northeasternmost province of Afghanistan. When the Taliban banned women from certain kinds of work in December 2022, she lost her job as a data-entry clerk. Salehi was terrified by the Taliban’s new laws, and fearful of worse yet to come. “Dying is better for us rather than living with these limitations,” she told me.

Hamida, 28, is a women’s-rights advocate living in Kabul. She is not married, and lives on her own. She told me that the Taliban’s laws are making her life extremely hard. She fears that if the country’s leaders find out she has no husband, they will force her to marry, or send her back to her family in nearby Bamyan, which would mean the end of many things she hoped for and worked hard for.

Ever since the U.S. left the country in 2021, millions of Afghan women have felt abandoned by the international community. The Taliban’s laws have violated their basic human rights day in and day out. But the women I spoke with told me that although the Taliban has brought back the oppression of its first regime, not all is the same. They—the women—have changed. They attended school and experienced living under a democratic government. They know they have rights. The new case at the ICJ, they pray, is a sign that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world knows this too.

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