Madeleine Clare Elish

In 1969, Milton Packin was pulled over for speeding on a New Jersey highway. He appealed the ticket, claiming that he wasn’t driving the car; it was the cruise control’s fault. The judge was neither convinced nor amused. “A motorist who entrusts his car to the control of an automatic device is ‘driving’ the vehicle and is no[t] less responsible for its operation,” he stated. Packin may not have been directly in control of the gas being fed to the motor, but he was still responsible for the speed of the car.