Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
So says a headline on this month's cover of Wired magazine. As the article notes, Google's self-driving cars have already traversed 200,000 miles:
As the news of Google’s self-driving car has spread, company Kremlinologists and auto industry wags alike have debated—with varying shades of anticipation or dread—whether it is a fun experiment or a serious challenge to the auto industry. Was the company just looking for an oxygen hit of innovation via its stockholder-straining techno-fantasist skunkworks, Google X? Is it just expressing the aw-shucks altruism the company is known for? The fanboy enthusiasms of higher management? Or does Google, as one report had it, have designs on building its own cars?
When I ask these questions around Google, the answers I get are polite, if bordering on exasperated. “Our clear statement,” [explains Google's Chris Urmson], “is we want to improve people’s lives by transforming mobility.” I get the sense that asking about business models is a bit rude. “Like a lot of things at Google, we want to figure out something big and important,” he continues, “and we’ll figure out the rest later.”
If Urmson’s team is taking a Googly approach to the auto industry, it’s also taking a Googly approach to driving. The company, Urmson notes, “is really all about processing big data,” and the road is just another data set to be mined. So Google isn’t teaching its computers how to drive. It’s collecting data—its cars have driven 200,000 miles in total, recording everything they see—and letting its algorithms figure out the rules on their own.
“If you read the DMV handbook on four-way stop signs, it’s easy,” Urmson says. “Whoever gets there first gets to go. If there are simultaneous arrivals, priority goes to the vehicle on the right.” But it rarely works that way. “People optimize stop signs,” he says. A polite robot vehicle, playing by the official driving rules, could be lost in a sea of aggressive humans. Instead, it needs to learn how people really drive. “This is the data-driven viewpoint,” says Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford roboticist who heads the self-driving project. “The data can make better rules. It’s very deep in the roots of almost everything Google does.” Urmson describes it as an attempt to “hack driving.”
As the article notes, for years our cars have had self-driving features--like cruise control and anti-lock breaks. Cars of the future will contain more and more self-driving features but human drivers will still retain much control:
As I drive the Mercedes through Palo Alto, I am reminded of a horseback outing in South America a few weeks earlier. A novice, I was put on an experienced and quite tame horse. It knew the route we were on by heart, accelerating when it could smell the comfort of its own stable, and I had to make only occasional corrections. “Driving an automated car is very much like riding a horse,” says Donald Norman, author of The Design of Future Things and a consultant for BMW, among other automakers. “You can ride a horse with tight reins or loose reins. Loose reins means the horse is in control—but even when you’re in control, the horse is still doing the low-level guidance, stepping safely to avoid holes and obstacles.”
While the technology of self-driving cars races forward, the most formidable challenges may be legal and political ones:
“There are places where technology outpaces the law,” Google’s Levandowski says. “This is one area where it outpaces it by a lot.” In California, there is no law concerning self-driving cars. In 2011, Google helped Nevada draft the first legislation to allow autonomous cars to be driven legally on state highways. It’s the only time a motor vehicle department has had to deal with the issue.
Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is when it comes to cars’ safety features. “People sue over all kinds of stuff. People sue because some feature that was supposed to protect them didn’t. People sue because their car didn’t have a blind-spot warning when other cars at the same price point did.” Imagine the complexity we’ll have when cars drive themselves. Who will be responsible for their operation—the car companies or the drivers? What happens, for example, when a highway patrol officer pulls over a self-driving car? Who gets the ticket?
As a RAND report observed, even as automakers create more semiautonomous technologies, they “will want to preserve the social norm that crashes are primarily the moral and legal responsibility of the driver, both to minimize their own liability and to ensure safety.” Consider what happened to the remote-parking assistant BMW developed a few years ago for getting into narrow spots. “You push a button and the car goes in and parks itself” while the driver waits outside, says Donald Norman, the Design of Future Things author. When he asked BMW executives why he didn’t see it on the market, Norman says he was told, “The legal team wouldn’t let them go forward.”
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Comments:
Jul '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
They'll have to pry my steering wheel out of my cold dead hands. Are these cars secure, or can a virus or hacker wreak havoc with them?
Jun '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
As long as it doesn't swerve or brake unexpectedly and spill my cocktail or mangle up the wet bar. That could be really unnerving especially when I'm wearing my 3D glasses while watching the large, pop-up HDTV. I may want to wait for the second or third generation models.
Dec '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Answer to both parts of that question is yes. Sure they'll be secure...right up until they're not. Will (enter company name here) be carrying insurance on our vehicles if we sign over driving responsibility to them?
I'll stick with being an active driver behind the wheel, thanks.
Jan '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Tim Groseclose:
Lawyers: Saving us from a better world since time immemorial.
Aug '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
I don't want a car that can drive itself, until I get a car that can drop me off, and go find a legal parking spot, and park itself, and come pick me back up when I'm done.
I can see a benefit to myself of a GPS network, where each individual car 'knows' where it's headed, and is 'aware' of congestion along the variable paths to that destination, and can suggest (not require) the creation of alternate routing per vehicle, or even the creation of 'smart convoys' based on car type and driving style.
Of course, this would have to be a private GPS network, that doesn't store user history in a retrievable format, and that protects the private users' data from prying eyes of government, (unless an actual, real life judge physically signs a warrant/subpoena requesting what little might still be left on the server.)
In that case... I want a car that could drive itself.
May '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
I think that the only way 'driver-less' cars will catch on would be if the government mandates it. Which we know it will, because then it will be easy to mandate that they can go no faster than 55mph, be 100% electric, and have no internal distractions.
Of course that means we will get to big sell job from everyone from the Transportation Dept to the Today Show. It will be billed by the 'experts' as the smart, safe thing to do. Don't you care about the children? Your individual liberty is a threat to the children, so get back in line....
Aug '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
The remote parking feature makes it sound like that's already in the works:
But my, what legal hangups automated cars will face!
Maybe this is a stupid suggestion, but since the article compared self-driving cars to horses, maybe that's how the law should treat them.
There must already be extensive laws on the books regarding horseback riding (which might apply to occupied self-driving cars) and straying livestock (damage from a self-driving car that "wanders off" without an occupant might be treated like damage from straying cattle).
Dec '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Tim,
In 1983, at my parents Thanksgiving table, my sister and brother-in-law were in attendance. Both holding medical degrees from a very prestigious medical school they presented an awesome amount of authority in matters medical.
However, an attitude I found surprising was that they fully believed that computers could replace physicians. I, being more computer savvy then they, braved my opinion. I said that in the end the computer is only a media and that any software that claims to be practicing will be subject to malpractice and that will be it's downfall.
I suggest that illusions about computers and driving may very well be subject to the same fate. The first time a computer controlled car kills someone, and believe me there will be a first time and many more, the company will be sued and the media will descend and that will be the end of it.
Regards,
Jim
Sep '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Charles Allen: I think that the only way 'driver-less' cars will catch on would be if the government mandates it. Which we know it will, because then it will be easy to mandate that they can go no faster than 55mph, be 100% electric, and have no internal distractions.
Of course that means we will get to big sell job from everyone from the Transportation Dept to the Today Show. It will be billed by the 'experts' as the smart, safe thing to do. Don't you care about the children? Your individual liberty is a threat to the children, so get back in line.... · 22 minutes ago
You took the words right out of my.... er... keyboard. Next up:
- controls on pedestrians to make sure they don't stray into traffic
- dietary laws to monitor and control what you buy in the supermarket and order in restaurants
Technology makes many things possible, especially monitoring and control by the state. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Sep '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
My stepfather was a traffic engineer; his firm had contracts to study "smart highways" in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Each time, they validated the technology, validated the designs, and concluded that automated cars could--indeed--travel the nation's highways.
Right up till the point where somebody blows a tire. Then everybody dies.
This, in engineering, is known as a "bad outcome."
Apr '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
The best use I see for self driving cars is truck driving, cabs, and buses. Think of the money you would save. In cities I think these vehicles would have a real benefit. You might not need to look for parking your car drops you off and then pick you up, in the mean time goes back. This I guess would not be fuel efficient though.
Aug '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
John Murdoch:
Right up till the point where somebody blows a tire. Then everybody dies.
This, in engineering, is known as a "bad outcome." · 8 hours ago
Pretty eloquently understated. Gotta love those engineers.
Dec '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Will we have to remove the alcohol from our gasoline? We don't want the car to get a DWI. What if the drunk car wants to mate with that hot little convertible?
Feb '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
What happens when a child dashes out in front of the car and the choices are (a)swerve into the other lane and hit opposing traffic, (b)go over embankment on the right, or (c)hit the child? Will the autopilot be programmed to evaluate this and all similar contingencies?
There was a Washington MetroRail accident in which the dispatcher denied the driver's request to turn off the automation and drive the train manually. The programming did not adequately account for the longer stopping distance due to icy track...train slid into a stopped train at a station and killed the driver.
Automatic control in a rail system with dedicated right-of-ways is far simpler than in an open system of roads and cars.
May '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
The real problem is that autonomous cars in the absence of a full smart highway system are not efficient.
For safety margin, they will program the car to leave such a wide margin of error that it will be like throwing thousands of old geezers back behind the wheel. It will cause traffic jams where there are none otherwise.
With a full smart highway system, you can actually synchronize the cars and reduce congestion. But that would require massive infrastructure and would require that a large portion of vehicles be specially equipped (e.g to synchronize their movement). basically, the government would have to mandate a standard and for ten years before ever turning the system on require cars to have the needed hardware. That's nonsense.
Sep '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
ctlaw:
With a full smart highway system, you can actually synchronize the cars and reduce congestion...basically, the government would have to mandate a standard and for ten years before ever turning the system on require cars to have the needed hardware....
It's worse than that. My dad's engineering firm did the FHWA studies on smart highways for three decades. "Smart highways" were a proven technology in the 1950s. And the 60s. And the 70s. AFAIK, GM still has the smart highway wires buried in the track at their proving ground.
Smart highways work.
The problem is, the system has to be able to deal with a car that has a tire blowout. Rapid deceleration, hard swerve into adjacent lane (or adjacent wall/barrier), and so forth. Massive, European autobahn-style pileup ensues.
And everybody dies.
The problem isn't just tires--it's lug nuts on wheels, cargo falling off vehicles in front, deer jumping into the roadway, kids dropping rocks from a bridge--even just running out of gas. You cannot control all of the externalities--and any one of them will kill people.
As I wrote above, in engineering terms that's a "bad outcome."
Edited on March 30, 2012 at 6:20pmMay '10
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
As a retired cab-driver many were the (slow) nights I dreamt up the system. And being computer savy and up-to-date , I can tell you it will be here quicker than you can imagine. The reason is massive growth of copmputing-power, better algorythms and extremely steep learning curve of the new machines, robots actually. Heck, in my last Mercedes E-Class (of course diesel!) something like 30% of the value were electronic systems. Even in the middle of Aarhus (Denmark's second city) I could steer the 4000-pound behemoth with only little finger of my left hand, leaving me time and my brain´s computing power to engage in airplane-cockpit - type scanning and monitoring the 360 ° arc outside (and sometimes, with threatening/unruly/piss drunk passengers inside!). I drove nearly 5 years without accident up to 300 km (200 mls) night shifts, months-on-end on icy roads, thanks to the gadgets of MB and Bosch. I think I could teach a monkey to drive the E-Class on a motorway: drive up to the limit of 110km/h (thanks to) automatic DSG gear box, engage the cruise control and keep the car straight!
Apr '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Come on guys! You all sound like a bunch of technophobes. I do a lot of driving, and from my experience we already have a lot of driverless vehicles on the road!
Feb '11
Re: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself
Have they taught the driverless car how to flip off the other driverless car? That's when I'll know it's for real.