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So you want a self-driving car. Will it really drive itself?

One of the big players in the Maine car business made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.,

PORTLAND, Maine — It was an intriguing pitch, and it came from an unlikely source. A few weeks ago Adam Lee, the chairman of Lee Auto Malls—the largest car dealership business in Maine—sent me an email noting that there had been a lot of stories in the news lately about self-driving cars. “I just took delivery of my third Tesla with the self-driving feature,” he wrote. “I was thinking it might be cool to outfit it with some cameras inside and out and take you for a ride demonstrating how well or not so well these features work.”

Now, your first reaction might be, well, that’s a bold piece of self-promotion. But it wasn’t: Adam Lee doesn’t sell Teslas. In fact, one of the things that makes Tesla distinctive is that it has no dealers; customers buy directly from the company.

207’s ace videographer Devin Crawford and I drove to the Lee dealership in Westbook to see what Adam’s car could do. (Since our news vehicles are not renowned for their futuristic technology, Devin kept a hand on the wheel the entire time.) As a third generation car dealer, he pays attention to the big issues in the automobile business, and one of the questions we had for him was whether self-driving vehicles represent the future of the car industry.

“The answer is yes,” he told me. “It’s all a matter of what the time horizon is.”

Are you already picturing yourself in a self-driving car in a few years, with your hands in your lap and your eyes closed as you drift off for a quick nap while cruising down Interstate 295? Lee is skeptical. He thinks the changes that self-driving cars bring to our lives in the next five or ten years will be modest.

“The idea that we’re going to sit in the passenger seat and the car’s going to come get us and take us places and then go home—that’s not happening,” he says. His guess is that commercial vehicles are in for the biggest technological changes. “Maybe Amazon,” he muses. “Maybe big trucks will be self-driving.”

Back to the self-driving feature on the Tesla. What does it do well? What does it do poorly or not at all? Watch our story. It’s hands-free, and it gives you a nice look at the technology that you’ll eventually have in your driveway.

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