I felt head­ed for a life­time of scratch­ing ​“94%, 94%, 94%” in tiny let­ters on the worn pages of a com­po­si­tion book.

Flirt­ing with dan­ger on the open road is as old as, well, motor­ing itself.

Ear­ly elec­tric cars per­formed bet­ter in cities than inter­nal com­bus­tion vehi­cles, but didn’t give rid­ers the same illu­sion of free­dom and mas­cu­line derring-do.

Uber and Lyft are upend­ing how we live by revers­ing a cen­tu­ry-long trend of ever-increas­ing auto­mo­bile depen­dence, with its atten­dant dead­en­ing sprawl, omnipresent dan­ger, and envi­ron­men­tal harm. Their rev­o­lu­tion will trans­form the $1.5 tril­lion busi­ness of sell­ing cars into a $10 tril­lion ​“mobil­i­ty as ser­vice” busi­ness, accord­ing to a report by Mor­gan Stan­ley (now the lead under­writer for the Uber IPO).

Blunt and regres­sive, Ford’s new TV com­mer­cials make do with­out jin­gles or CEOs, opt­ing instead for Break­ing Bad’s scary-man­ly-pater­nal (don’t for­get Mal­colm in the Mid­dle) Bryan Cranston. Dressed in Steve Jobs gear, Cranston is on the verge of deliv­er­ing a ​“Future Talk” when he shakes it off at the last minute: ​“The future wasn’t made in a keynote speech,” he declares. (Pre­sum­ably this includes Jim Hackett’s keynote speech about Ford’s future.) Next he’s in an easy chair aboard Air Force One: ​“A pres­i­den­tial speech did not land us on the moon.” Cut to men with pock­et pro­tec­tors sweat­ing over the Apol­lo Lunar Lan­der. ​“Mil­lions of man hours did.”