Between Analog and Digital

There is but a small window remaining of the wild, untethered car still powered by the human driver. The era is closing.

At the same time, cheap swarms of drones collecting data from public observations, and then relaying that to mobile devices will overlap for a few years with the human driver.

In the chaos, subversion will be powered by a fleet of automated observation.

Drones can discover police from the lights of their traffic stops, and then perpetually track them and relay their exact positions to drivers. Unmarked police who ever once make a traffic stop can be detected and followed, needing parking garages and other evasive techniques.

Drones will likely pick up license plates, requiring those be cycled or hidden if police want to avoid detection and tracking.

An app on your phone or car will know the location of all nearby police, allowing you to drive at the speed you prefer. This can be combated by the state with speed cameras, which can be combated by the people with polarized license plate covers and aggressive drones that spray paint over speed cameras or illicitly deploy nanoenergetics to disable cameras.

In this anarchy, before all traffic is perfectly synchronized and tracked, a temporary wild west reemerges before it is murdered and programmed.

Everyone will have their own primitive air force, some militarized, some merely gathering intelligence data.

Policing will scramble trying to invent new roles before the traffic-based fines vanish as a funding source. Robberies will shift to being done electronically or on foot/bicycle as all cars will register themselves with centrally monitored systems, making it trivial to determine who received transportation to and from the crime scene.