A self-driving cab should offer a certain kind of privacy. You summon it with an app. It arrives quietly, unlocks only for you. When you slide into the back seat, there’s no driver: no one up front to watch, listen, or accidentally overhear whatever it is you’re doing back there. Since most are electric, the footwell is flat and open, no transmission hump. It feels like more room than you’re used to.

When autonomous taxis first showed up in San Francisco in 2023, stories followed about people having sex in the back of driverless Cruise robotaxis. The details were based on a handful of interviews, but the idea was enough to trigger a brief right-wing media panic. Fox News, the New York Post, and Breitbart all weighed in. Cruise disappeared not long after (that’s another story), and Google’s Waymo SUVs rolled in to replace them. Despite what those early reports suggested, they haven’t ushered in a new era of backseat love.

This is a weird turn for a machine that’s been about sex nearly from the start. The earliest cars offered little improvement over the buggies they replaced: no doors, no roofs, no windows, no heat, leaving couples exposed to the elements and onlookers. But by the 1920s most cars were enclosed, obscuring occupants and their actions. Interiors became climate controlled. Long, padded bench seats replaced hard wooden benches. The 1930s Nash had front and rear seats that could fold and transform into a makeshift bed, prompting its typically dour president to refer to its Statesman model as a “young man’s car.”

Long before Chappell Roan belted out “Knee-deep in the passenger seat,” musicians were celebrating car sex. Tin Pan Alley composers cranked out titles like “Take Me Out for a Joy Ride,” “When He Wanted to Love Her, He’d Put Up the Cover,” and “Tumble in a Rumble Seat.” Some automakers even commissioned songwriters to praise their vehicles’ sexual suitability as an early form of viral marketing.

Lovers’ lanes multiplied on the edges of towns, often with the tacit approval of police. Cars gave young people a place to fool around away from their parents, which helped accelerate the loosening of sexual norms in the 1920s.

Cars also expanded the dating pool beyond whoever lived within walking distance. Early sociologists warned that this mobility might “lead to more crossbreeding” among the populace, according to automotive historian David L. Lewis. In response to that fear and a fraudulent “white slavery” trafficking panic, the federal government passed the Mann Act of 1910, making it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for sexual purposes. Prosecution landed disproportionately on interracial couples.

In-car sex wasn’t explicitly illegal, but police could selectively charge people with public indecency or lewdness—especially those involved in homosexuality, adultery, or premarital sex.

The world’s oldest profession was quick to adapt. Prostitutes and their pimps began using cars to solicit customers and as a place to conduct business in the 1920s. Progressive-era anti-vice campaigns that targeted brothels accelerated the shift. Venereologist and U.S. Public Health Service senior official O.C. Wenger said that “with the suppression of red-light districts, the automobile had replaced the room of the prostitute.”

Things got busier when the first drive-in movie theater opened in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 1933. The drive-in’s amorous possibilities were immediately recognized. Municipalities tried to stop them from becoming “licensed petting places,” and judges deemed them contributions to juvenile delinquency.

But the moral panic had other roots. Drive-ins were often unsegregated, even in the South, allowing for intermingling between the races. Some drive-in owners hired “auto pimps,” who dressed as ushers but could procure sex workers to visit patrons’ vehicles. And as censorship standards eroded, drive-ins increasingly screened kung fu, blaxploitation, queer, and X-rated movies that challenged the status quo.

Youth culture’s adoption of the van eventually eclipsed the drive-in. A van customized with heavily tinted windows, a bar, a bong, a video player, and a bed could transform any location into a mobile bedroom. Bumper stickers advertised what was happening inside: if this van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’; don’t laugh, your daughter may be in here.

Vans became especially important for sexual minorities, particularly queer people, who valued their privacy and mobility. This remains true even in an age of app-based hookups. “If you are living in a repressive or restrictive home life, the car has historically been the sexual retreat of not even choice, but need,” says Cindy Gallop, a branding consultant and founder of Make Love Not Porn.

So where does that leave us now? Recent surveys from the Kinsey Institute, Driving-Tests.org, and The Journal of Sex Research show that as many as 84% of American adults have had sexual experiences in a car. But they also show something else: People frequently emerge cramped and unsatisfied. And the trend is shifting. Millennials report fewer in-car sexual experiences than Gen Xers or Boomers. Gen Z appears headed in the same direction.

Self-driving cars should, in theory, fix this. Without steering wheels, pedals, or the need for front-facing seats, the interior could be reimagined entirely. Sex could happen safely on the highway or even while cruising through Yosemite, which would certainly redefine sightseeing.

Except for one problem with the robotaxis currently on the road: Someone else owns them, which means someone else is watching. Waymo’s cabs use multiple internal cameras to monitor rider behavior. Users caught transgressing can be banned from the app. Recordings can be turned over to authorities. “Date night is great,” a Waymo spokesperson says. “But we encourage our amorous riders to save the rest for their destination. We prioritize safety and cleanliness, and our team may follow up with riders who are jeopardizing the service for others.”

So is this the end of the car as a sexualized space? It depends on who controls the technology. In an individually owned autonomous vehicle, drivers should be able to opt out of surveillance, turn the cameras off, or decide for themselves how the space is used.

“Cars are like hotel rooms,” Gallop says. “There’s something aphrodisiac-like about them.” What that turns into, in a driverless world, depends on who owns the keys…and who has the footage.