Now driverless cars and their promise to reduce America’s road deaths is collapsing some of the differences between car companies and tech companies. “What Silicon Valley learned is the car business is a very, very sophisticated business, and it’s not really easy to design, engineer, manufacture, distribute a vehicle with critical safety systems and so many parts in it,” Lawrence Burns, a former GM executive and former adviser to Waymo, told me over email. “What the auto industry learned from this is that there’s extraordinary talent and capability in Silicon Valley for digital technology, software and experience design applied to the future of transportation.”