Driving Cars
Driving Cars
[Cueball stands in front of a car holding his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
[Caption below the panel:] Driving freaks me out.

This comic is about how dangerous cars are. Cueball observes that it is a giant machine, and that he is able to accelerate it up to terrifying speeds simply because he once took a brief driving test. Note that the length and complexity of a driving test varies greatly per country. 20 minutes would be fairly normal for the USA, but much shorter than what is required on most other Western countries. However, it should be noted that you sometimes have to retake the test if your drivers license has expired, so the "just because I took a twenty minute test in high school" part is partially incorrect.
This is similar to other comics, such as 1075: Warning and 722: Computer Problems , where Randall comments on how some of our routine, everyday tasks are quite unusual when viewed from a reductionist perspective. This subject has been covered in the many comics about Self-driving cars . Although this comic is not directly about such cars, the reference to Cueball steering with his hands could be seen as being in contrast with letting a computer drive (which is much safer ). The joke is that driving is in fact one of the top five most common causes of death, yet many (most?) people do not think of driving as an especially "scary" or "dangerous" activity.
The rest of the joke is in the title text, "It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!" This statement is ironic, drawing attention to the fact that many people ( over 3,000 per day world-wide, about 100 per day in the USA) do in fact die in car crashes. These statistics indicate that driving is as dangerous as Cueball thinks it seems; it is not just him perceiving it that way. As a matter of fact, in most regions of the US, automotive accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 35. It's also worth noting that a difficult-to-estimate number of people die prematurely as a consequence of pollution caused by cars.
[Cueball stands in front of a car holding his hands together in front of him.] Cueball: Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
[Caption below the panel:] Driving freaks me out.
