> the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous

How silly, even autonomous vehicles have steering. They may be built without the wheel, but they have some kind of steering mechanism

> or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start

I hope your wheels never lose alignment and that you're pointed exactly where you want to go at the start.

It's not a weird example at all if you don't come up with crazy unrealistic situations that don't match actual cars or the metaphor.

My point is just that progress is a vector, is has direction, and our economic theories generally ignore this and treat it as a scaler: if the number is going up then things must be good. When actually, the number going up just means that we're moving quickly in an arbitrary direction that has nothing to do with our needs and very well may be undermining them.