Alex Davies

Christie Hemm Klok

Alex Davies is a journalist and author who tells stories about the people, technologies, and ideas shaping the future. He has reported for and led editorial teams at Wired, The Athletic, and Business Insider, covering everything from autonomous vehicles and electric aviation to Formula 1 and the engineers behind the systems we rely on every day.

His new book, Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering (W.W. Norton, 2026), explores the hidden world of product testing and the people pushing machines, medicines, and models to their limits to keep the world safe.

His debut book Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2021), is an award-winning inside account of the self-driving industry.

After years in newsrooms across the country, he now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his husband, daughter, and dog.

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Communities: LGBTQ+

Books:

Kobuk the Destroyer

And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering
Science / Medicine / Technology
W. W. Norton
September 2026
ISBN 9781324051299
Hardcover, 0 pages

When a manufacturer wants to certify a product as "bear-resistant" --a cooler, a trash can, a camping food canister--they turn to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee and its resident panel of product-testing bears. Over the years, one bear has become infamous for his penchant for cracking locking mechanisms and crushing manufacturer dreams, but thereby helping to keep our food--and us--safe: Kobuk the Destroyer. From "childproof" bottle caps to the cars and planes we ride, such stories underlie the products we use every day and can generally trust to do what they say and not (unexpectedly) dump us out of the sky or blow up. As Alex Davies reveals, this amazing reliability is thanks to the mostly invisible, maniacal, yet methodical work of test engineers, who divine how everything and anything could go wrong and plan for it in advance--using rocket sleds, chicken cannons, and any means necessary. Uncovering the surprisingly profound science behind the fine print on the label, Kobuk the Destroyer is as wildly entertaining as it is illuminating. More/less

Driven

The Race to Create the Autonomous Car
Science / Medicine / Technology
Simon & Schuster
January 2021
ISBN 9781501199431
Hardcover, 304 pages

Alex Davies tells the “illuminating and important narrative” (Steven Levy, author of Facebook: The Inside Story) of the quest to develop driverless cars—and the fierce competition between Google, Uber, and other companies in a race to revolutionize our lives. The self-driving car has been one of the most vaunted technological breakthroughs of recent years. But early promises that these autonomous vehicles would soon be on the roads have proven premature. Alex Davies follows the twists and turns of the story from its origins to today. The story starts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was charged with developing a land-based equivalent to the drone, a vehicle that could operate in war zones without risking human lives. DARPA issued a series of three “Grand Challenges” that attracted visionaries, many of them students and amateurs, who took the technology from Jetsons-style fantasy to near-reality. The young stars of the Challenges soon connected with Silicon Valley giants Google and Uber, intent on delivering a new way of driving to the civilian world. Soon the automakers joined the quest, some on their own, others in partnership with the tech titans. But as road testing progressed, it became clear that the challenges of driving a car without human assistance were more formidable than anticipated. Davies profiles the industry’s key players from the early enthusiasm of the DARPA days to their growing awareness that while this spin on artificial intelligence isn’t yet ready for rush-hour traffic, driverless cars are poised to remake how the world moves. Driven explores “the epic tale of competition and comradery, long odds and underdogs, all in service of a world-changing moonshot” (Andy Greenberg, author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar). More/less