Category: Travel

Trial Lawyers Lobby Against Autonomous Vehicles

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers. Remarkably the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and the have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade! The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation (see also reports here). (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labor and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded).

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5 million liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered.

The UK’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 does basically this–a single insurer covers the vehicle whether the human or the automated system is driving; the victim is compensated directly by the insurer, no need to establish product defect; the insurer then subrogates against the manufacturer if the software was at fault. Victims get paid fast, manufacturers face the cost of their defects through recoveries and premiums, and the high-transaction costs (i.e. lawyer fees!) and messy manufacturer-versus-victim litigation is replaced by insurer-versus-manufacturer bargaining between repeat players who settle efficiently.

The great thing about this system is that insurance almost certainly deters better than tort: fleets generate data that makes experience rating precise, so insurers become continuous safety regulators, whereas litigation delivers a noisy, lagged, lottery like signal depending on safety-irrelevant factors of the jury and the locale.

We have the best data on Waymo, Tesla data is murkier but note how well this works with the insurance system. Let the insurers decide how much to charge Tesla robotaxis and FSD drivers–they will internalize the externality far better than tort lawyers. In short, insurance works great for accident victims but not for trial lawyers. Indeed, if the trial lawyers have their way accident victims will continue to be buried in an invisible graveyard.

Hat tip: Andy Hall and Jon Slotkin.

Spreading AI to the rest of the world

by  Tyler Cowen in

Another job we’ll have, I call this imperialism, but I mean that in a value neutral way. But AI comes to different parts of the world at different speeds. I think the countries where AI changes a lot of things first, there’ll be a very high demand for people from those places, which I’ll think to be the US, possibly UK, to go around the rest of the world and teach people in other places how to integrate AI into what we have. And a lot of those demands won’t be fully rational. They won’t be, oh, give us the best possible AI. They’ll be like, oh, we’re Peruvians. We want to keep things a certain way. You may or may not agree, but we want you to give us a version of AI that helps keep it that way. And that will be the job. And I think Americans in particular, probably Brits as well, huge growth sector will be living in other parts of the world spreading AI. And again, the fact that AI can do it better may or may not be true, but I don’t think it’s what will matter. I think the Peruvians or some analogue will want humans to come and listen to their concerns and assure and persuade them as humans, that’s what they’re going to get. I’m not saying it’s always going to go well, but that will always be, I think, a big job for humans to do.

It’s already a growth sector for Americans to want to live abroad. Like we have all this accumulated wealth. Life in America can be a bit dull. Life in Europe in particular is amazing. Personally, I love life in most parts of Latin America. So it’s already a trend for Americans to live overseas. For another reason, it’s nothing to do with AI. So if there are all these future job opportunities, like full of meaning, like come to Kenya, help Kenya, you can save 73 lives or maybe like 73,000 lives, help them build out their AI in a way that’s acceptable to them. That’ll just be this phenomenally rich inner and outer life. And I think it’ll be a great source of job creation.

I have already linked to the transcript of the talk.

Wiesbaden notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Who goes to Wiesbaden these days?  The era of Russian nobles taking the cure here and gambling is long since gone.  And yet here we are.  The proximate cause of this trip is the desire to see Grigory Sokolov, one of the world’s great pianists and a cult figure of sorts.  He rarely tours North America, maybe these days never as he is 76.  The current program includes Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata, Beethoven’s Op.126 Bagetelles, and Schubert’s last piano sonata.  How can one say no?  Sokolov also was a favorite of Tom Schelling, I might add, especially his recording of The Art of the Fugue, in my view one of the best classical music recordings of all time.

Besides, I have long been a believer in semi-random excursions to mid-size, slightly neglected German cities.  There remains a strong cultural federalism in Germany, and so you might see and hear wonderful things in many different parts of the country.

I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens.  In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim.  But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German.  I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves.  The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.

Over the last twenty years, inflation-adjusted real estate prices in Wiesbaden have gone up about forty percent, an OK performance.  At times the city “does not feel like Germany any more,” but I think it is holding on.  The proportion of new building is roughly equal to the population growth, so I do not think this price effect is a NIMBY effect.  Rather it reflects the fact that Wiesbaden is still a pretty nice place to live.  that said, in some significant ways Germany in the traditional sense is failing to reproduce itself.

It was stunning to me to discover how hard it is, in most of the downtown, to find plain, ordinary German food.  At any price level.  There is no current equivalent of Wienerwald or Nordsee to be seen, never mind a decent Wiener Schnitzel.

Much of Wiesbaden was destroyed and rebuilt, but the best fifteen or twenty buildings show the previous wealth and splendor to good effect.  You will see these gems walking around, though only periodically.  There is also an old Roman wall and a moving, more recent Holocaust memorial.

Most German ice cream just isn’t that good, so try L’Art Sucre for something French.

Museum Reinhard Ernst is the new institution in town, and it specializes in color field abstract art.  The building is impressive, but the collection is weak except for a few Stellas.  Why organize a museum around that basis unless the underlying collection is super strong in that area?  This one is not.  I can forgive the absence of the expensive American Ellsworth Kelly, but no Blinky Palermo or Günther Förg?

Nonetheless their restrooms might forestall this kind of Larry David conflict:

(At Museum Ludwig in Köln, by the way, you get the discount for being disabled only if you have “fifty degrees of disability,” however they might measure that.  Slight disabilities are not enough, you must be truly “schwerbehinderte,” as judged by the state, heaven forbid the museum rely on the honor system.)

Museum Wiesbaden in contrast was an unexpected delight.  Although it is mainly a natural history museum, they have one of the world’s best collections of Art Nouveau and the single best Jawlensky collection, and you can have these all to yourself.  Very few people seem to go there.

As for the economy, here are some Germany facts of the day.  Yet Germany continues, and visits remain a source of pleasure and interest.

Sokolov, by the way, played six encores.  Where should the Germany trip target next year?

Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end.  From Jackson:

Links

From the episode summary:

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be

Excerpt:

Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.

…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?

Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.

There is much more of interest, self-recommending!

An infovore shares his chats

by  Tyler Cowen in

In conjunction with OpenAI, here is a short piece by me on how to use GPT Pro for travel and a few other matters.  Excerpt:

6. Learn what to look for in an art museum

I’m visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts. Which pictures in particular should I be looking for, and what is some useful context for viewing them?

Why was this chat valuable? “After two visits in three days, I would second the advice I got from this chat.”

Here is the link to the answer.  And know when to ask it to read the local newspapers for you, to learn about a place.

There are some good photos in the piece, including some hitherto unpublished photos of Spinoza.

What should the UAP Scientific Advisory Board do?

by  Tyler Cowen in

There are more and more frauds, charlatans, and lunatics entering this area of inquiry.  It is important to stay disciplined on data-driven questions, most importantly to what extent are released (and unreleased) videos backed by radar, satellite, eyewitness and other forms of confirming evidence?  By confirming, I do not mean “confirming they are aliens,” rather I mean “confirming they are real phenomena and not illusions of various kinds.”

Do not focus the discourse on aliens, rather focus on whether the phenomena are real.  If they are confirmed as real, as many insiders insist, they we can return to debating what they might be.  And focusing on concrete evidence is something a committee can be relatively good at.  Trying to find agreement on “aliens” does not fall into that same category.

My excellent Conversation with Katja Hoyer

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?

HOYER: How much time have I got?

COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?

HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.

If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.

When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.

The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.

People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1930, three years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.

COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.

HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.

People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.

Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.

I very much enjoyed Katja’s recent book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

Sao Paulo notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong.  The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly.  In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.

Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.

It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.

Sao Paulo as a city is much improved.  The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size.  The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene.  It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival.  It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders.  In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist.  That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.

Sao Paulo has food to die for.  It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well.  I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant.  The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.

For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world?  For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay.  For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well.  Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound.  All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.

People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.

I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.

Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy.  Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending.  But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy.  Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem.  Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks.  Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.

My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population.  In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory.  A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally.  More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size.  There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.

Will Brazilian fertility tick back up?  Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s?  Unclear.  But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.

Lifestyle and living standards arbitrage

by  Tyler Cowen in

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas.

The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification.

More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care.

On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania. The former Stalinist state offers a special visa allowing U.S. citizens to live and work there, with no tax on foreign income for a year, no questions asked.

“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” said Expatsi founder Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old Alabama native who moved to Yucatán, Mexico, in 2024.

“Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” she said as she ticked through growth numbers.

Here is more from the WSJ.  And we are not yet into the era of “AI-savvy Americans being paid lots to help foreign countries manage their own transitions.”

My excellent Conversation with Toby Wilkinson

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Most of all, we cover Ptolemaic Egypt.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Either technologically or institutionally, what is it that the Persians had that the Egyptians did not?

WILKINSON: The Persians had a pretty formidable army. Their military technology was certainly superior to the Egyptians at the time that they conquered Egypt originally in the 6th century BC. Like many empires, I suppose, throughout history, they overreached themselves. They overextended themselves, and they found it increasingly hard to hold together this empire stretching all the way from the Aegean to the borders of India. Bits of the empire started to fragment and pull away. Egypt had always had this very strong sense of its own identity. When it had a chance to throw off the Persian yoke, it took it.

COWEN: Let’s think about some of the achievements of Ptolemaic Egypt as an era. Infrastructure. What did they do that was most impressive?

WILKINSON: Build Alexandria. Alexandria the city was a new foundation established by Alexander the Great to bear his name. Unlike all previous ancient Egyptian cities, it was a city built from the outset for commerce. It was a city built on the Mediterranean coast with a great natural harbor, with facilities for loading and offloading ships. It had a great lighthouse guarding the entrance to its harbor, which became one of the wonders of the world. The whole city was really designed from the get-go as a great commercial center looking outwards to the Mediterranean, rather than inwards to the rest of Egypt.

COWEN: Canals, artificial lake. What else did they do?

WILKINSON: They built a city quite unlike anything previously seen in the valley of the river Nile. In fact, any inhabitant today of a modern city would recognize the grid iron pattern of streets. Streets intersecting at right angles, that was something completely unheard of until this point in Egypt with vast public buildings. This was the Manhattan of the ancient world, if you like, in scale, in grandeur, and in the level of commercial activity.

And:

EN: What were the main exports of the Alexandria region? What are they selling, making?

WILKINSON: Oh, the two big exports that account for the lion’s share of Egypt’s wealth at the time are gold and grain. Gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia up to this point, but it’s still the place in the ancient world that produces large quantities of gold. Of course, gold has always been a great currency of international commerce.

Then Egypt is famed as the breadbasket of the ancient world. It produces a superabundance of grain thanks to the fertility of the Nile and the benign climate. It produces more than it needed for its own consumption, by comparison with poorer agricultural regions in Greece and Asia Minor, which struggled to produce enough food. Yes, gold and grain were the absolute engine of Egyptian prosperity.

COWEN: There’s metalwork, there’s glass. What else is there, manufacturing, as we would call it today?

WILKINSON: Oh, yes. There’s a big ceramics industry, so producing not just pots, but terracotta statues and votive objects. There’s glassmaking, as you’ve said. There’s advanced metallurgy, goldsmithing, ironworking, copper and bronze foundries. There’s what we might call the decorative arts, so sculpture, painting. All of these things thrived in ancient Alexandria.

COWEN: Do they have living standards sustainably above subsistence, or is this a Malthusian equilibrium, where they get some wealth and then more people survive and the wage falls again, and it doesn’t get much above what is required to keep people alive?

Recommended, informative and interesting throughout.  And I am very happy to recommend all of Toby’s books, including his latest The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra.

Detroit notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

It remains one of America’s most interesting cities, and now it is seeing a continuing comeback.  Downtown remains mostly empty of foot traffic, but I was stunned to see new office buildings and signs of budding prosperity.  It did not feel abandoned or hopeless.

Detroit Institute of Art is one of America’s best art museums, showing impeccable taste, though it is notable how much the picture donations simply disappear after some point in time.  This is a temple for those are skeptical about modern art, as you will not find it reprensented much here.  The American art, the Rembrandt Visitation, the Poussin Holy Family, the Breughel, and the huge Diego Rivera murals are all to die for.  The average quality of painting is high as well.

Baobab Fare, not too far from the museum, is a good Burundian (!) restaurant in town.

I was lucky enough to visit the General Motors research and development complex in Cranbrook, mostly designed by Eero Saarinen, due to the ingenuity of Dan Wang (it is mostly not open to the public).  Around 20,000 people work there, and it remains a temple of modernist architecture, perhaps anachronistic in effect but beautiful nonetheless.  I had not realized how strong the colors were, as that does not come through in the photos.

The Saarinen (papa Saarinen!) house in the Cranbrook Art Museum is perhaps the best Art Deco design I have seen.  The museum itself has excellent architecture, sculptures, and gardens, rather than being much of an art museum proper.

Here are good NYT photos of that part of the joy ride.

Overall a trip to the Detroit area is one of the very best American visits you can do, highly recommended, automobile required of course that is why they call it the Motor City.