Set at some point in the 22nd century, people no longer drive cars themselves, instead relying on cars with an artificial intelligence to drive for them. But when the AI systems in these cars started malfunctioning, causing the cars to lose control, a team called eX-Drivers (or eX-D for short) were formed, driven by actual drivers, to chase down the cars that have gone crazy. I don't know why the group of people who actually drive cars are the ones called eX-Drivers, but whatever.
The series follows three such eX-Drivers, Lorna, Lisa, and new addition to the group, Soichi. Soichi is the youngest of the group at 12 years old, and the other two are in their teens. I imagine that making them younger was to appeal to a younger audience, and I don't really mind having three kids as the main characters since this is more geared to a younger audience, but it just raises questions to me, like how does a 12 year get a license, especially for such a dangerous job. But I'm guessing this is going off of Pokemon rules, with how children are often put into dangerous situations but somehow never get hurt, with this series relying on the same set of convenient rules.
eX-Driver does bring up some neat concepts to explore, such as an underground community of drivers mentioned in the first episode where characters have a boost button in their car and have modified the cars programming, and later in the series, there are characters with gasoline cars that can't be tracked by the same system as the AI cars and are off the grid. It would have been neat if the series explored this stuff, but unfortunately due to it being only 6 episodes, it never really gets to do that.
And that's not taking into account other stuff that it could have brought up. Is there no one would doesn't trust the automated systems of the cars, and even cites statistics of AI failures, or at least talks about all of the news stories of failing AI as a reason to not have an AI car? Or even just dislikes the idea in general, based purely on personal preference. What about people who simply can't afford the AI cars, or simply don't care about what car they drive, and just want a way of getting to where they're going? And I'm pretty sure there are car enthusiasts out there who would want to drive, tune, and build their own cars, or just want to buy and deal with classic cars. You could have even had an episode where a mentor once shows his skills of to the kids, who hope to be as good of a driver as him one day.
There could have even been an episode where the characters didn't have access to cars, like being stranded somewhere where they didn't have access to the system, or being forced to take a break since the job is clearly stressing them out, and it ends up being a bonding experience. There was enough here for it to expand out to a 12-episode series at least, but unfortunately we got stuck with what we have.
All of these could have been good ideas for episodes, and could have easily broken up the repetitive monotony of the series and at least taken the series from a completely forgotten for good reason series to a beloved cult classic with a few neat ideas.
The series also came out at that time when anime was transitioning from traditionally done animation cels to digital animation, and it obviously shows. Characters look flat and overly bright at times and the whole thing just looks mediocre at the best of times.
Which is unfortunate, because the series clearly shows off Kosuke Fujishima's love of cars, and by extension, motorcycles, and seeing it either be done a few years earlier with cel animation or a few years later when studios were more experienced with digital animation and the detail of the cars would have really popped out more, it would have at least made it worth watching for the eye candy.
And it seems like such a waste to not let Kosuke to show off his love of said vehicles and let him stretch his creativity a bit for a sci-fi series with cars we haven't seen before. If this couldn't have been continued as an anime, it would have been nice to see Kosuke continue it as a manga at least.
The only interesting thing about this series is just how predictive of self-driving cars it was. But since it never goes that in-depth with the concept either, so there's no real reason to watch the series based on that alone.
While eX-Driver is nowhere near the worst thing that I've watched, I doubt that anyone is clamoring for a re-release. But considering some of the stuff that Discotek have picked up, I wonder how long it would be before they get their hands on a release for this. Unless this get some sort of new series that actually expands on the concepts of the series, I can't really recommend it.
