From Montreal-based Marcon’s Autonomous Vehicle Newsletter:
Professor Alberto Broggi at VisLab’s facilities, located at the University of Parma, is a definite celebrity in the world of autonomous vehicles. He is what one would call a pioneer of machine vision as applied to driverless / unmanned vehicles. His research activities in the field of autonomous drive started in the early 1990s when few were investigating the applicability of artificial vision on board moving vehicles.
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The IEEE foresees autonomous vehicles accelerating car sharing. Do you agree with this forecast?
Yes, I’m seeing the future populated by shared cars (nopersonal cars any more) which will be totally autonomous, very efficient and always available. When not in service, they will be parked out of town (no more parking downtown).
Once this technology will be considered sufficiently mature, human and goods mobility will totally change:
1 No more personal vehicles: all vehicles will be driverless and shared, just like cabs without a driver. The vehicle will be called upon necessity, and once the destination will be reached, the vehicle will be available to the next passenger.
2 No more parked cars alongside roads: once reaching its destination, the vehicle will be available to the next passenger or will autonomously reach a parking space, which may also be in a remote location.
3 No more traffic lights: vehicles, thanks to their inter-vehicle communication capabilities, will coordinate to pass through intersections with a constant flow, without interfering with each other.
4 No more traffic jams: vehicle will coordinate, avoiding to hit congested areas in order to minimize travel time.
5 No more driving licenses: everyone will enjoy enhanced mobility on roads without the need for a driving license, included elderly, young, and handicapped individuals.
6 No building of new roads for a long time: vehicle will be able to move at high speeds and with a short inter-vehicle distance so that the current road network will be able to host a larger number of vehicles; the throughput of each ex i s t ing lane wi l l be greatly incremented.
7 No more accidents: finally the road will be an accident-free environment and road.
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BUT THEN THERE’S THIS:
From Megan McArdle at Bloomberg News:
To Enjoy Driverless Cars, First Kill All the Lawyers
I’m still worried about the future of driverless cars, not because they’re technically impossible, but because the liability possibilities are enormous.
… even if the overall number of accidents drops, the number of accidents where the automaker is perceived to be at fault will approach 100 percent. After all, they’re the ones who designed or installed the software that made the decision. And while in theory, a jury should be able to say, “Well, this was a hard design problem, you can’t make everyone happy, and this is an unfortunate tragedy,” in practice, this is unlikely. If the machine built by a corporation made a decision that killed or seriously injured a person, the jury is going to give the person money at the expense of the corporation.
These issues make me very worried for the future of driverless cars. Understand that I’d love to be wrong — I, too, want a car that will let me nap while it does the hard work. But I think this is a big hurdle for the nascent industry to jump. They may “jump” it by specifying that drivers are expected to be alert and at the wheel at all times. That would still be good from a safety standpoint — auto fatalities would fall a lot. But it would be far from The Dream.
Too dumb to be believed.
Responses to the pessimist
1. Google said they’ll just pay out. http://technooptimist.tumblr.com/post/47295860680/i-asked-him-whether-liability-laws-would-be-a
2. Some jurisdiction will approve them. India? Alaska?
3. People like to cite all sorts of fantasy moral decisions: how does the car choose between the life of the ball-chasing child, or the life of the occupant who crashes into. These strike me as spurious. A robotaxi will never travel above 30kmh on a STREET, and will slam on the brakes quicker than any human. And what is a kid doing playing on a ROAD? (Terms capitalized to indicate archetypes: STREETS are thoroughfares within municipal boundaries, have buildings either side, intersections, multiple modes, are pedestrian-first areas; ROADs are inter-municipal thoroughfares, like freeways and railroads and country roads.)
A- but what I want to know is what happens to that old chestnut- the road trip? Do we now all use trains more to get from, let’s say Los Angeles to Sacramento? California is already test running the Google driverless cars this year. So this isn’t as far off as you think.
Will I use a car sharing car to pull my tent trailer on a 2 week camping trip?
Actually Tim, that is not a bad idea. I loved to take unscheduled road trips back when I still had a car. Now I am wondering if there will be shared cars that you don’t drive that are RVs! Snooze in the back while your RV (a little one to save on gas!) finds the next camping spot!
I’d like to see something like happens now with vaccines. In the US there’s the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) which provides compensation to people that suffer from a suite of ailments that might be associated with a vaccine. The standard of proof is very low so there are more pay outs than necessary, but it means that companies can produce vaccines without worrying about harassment lawsuits. And like self-driving cars, vaccines provide a huge benefit to society while possibly harming specific individuals (or even just creating the perception of individual harm).
If self-driving cars are demonstrated to provide these benefits, then the lives of many will be saved. It could make sense for the government to erect a similar sort of firewall. If there’s concern, we could make exceptions for negligence or other gross errors.
Politicians have successfully dealt with similar issues, even in very litigious countries like the US. I don’t know if it’ll happen here, but at this stage there’s still room to hope.
Driverless cars could successfully bring car sharing to the less dense suburbs.
I’d like to know how a massive fleet of driverless cars would be financed because it sounds an awful lot like the existing public transit system.
We need a huge fleet of buses to serve rush hours that are then driven empty to a parking facility where they do nothing but depreciate. Rush hours aren’t going to disappear so a universal driverless car fleet would also have to be much bigger than needed most of the day. Many of the cars would never be shared at all. They’d take one person to work, sit empty all day, take the same or different person home and then sit empty all night.
Current car sharing companies have fleet sizes much smaller than the total number of trips. The cars are used multiple times per day. That allows co-ops to actually make money instead of requiring the huge public subsidy that the transit system needs.
We accept the subsidy for transit because we know it provides a valuable service that’s difficult to measure.
If driverless cars were operated on the same financial model as public transit then there would have to be a large subsidy for it too. As a society we’d be able to afford it because nobody would need to buy, insure, maintain and fuel up their own car anymore.
At an individual level the results would be very different. It would be like U-Pass in reverse. Instead of drivers being forced to buy low cost transit passes, pedestrians, cyclists and transit users would be forced to buy (or absorb through other levels of taxation) a low cost car pass. Drivers would get huge cost savings while the difference was passed along to everyone else.
Like U-Pass it would induce a lot of new trips on the subsidized mode. In this case it would get people using cars when they would otherwise walk, cycle, take the bus or not travel at all.
The public transit model for a universal driverless car fleet would be a disaster for society.
Unfortunately the commercial car sharing model won’t work either because it relies on having more customers than cars.
That leaves only one possible result: the status quo, privately owned/leased cars, short term rental cars and taxis. All that would change would be the replacement of drivers with computers.
We’d still have single occupant vehicles, groups travelling together and car pools, but car pools would be vastly more efficient because they could be formed on the fly in response to real time demand. Obviously there would have to be a security model in place to permit strangers to share a driverless car. What little privacy we currently enjoy would be impossible, but that’s an essay for another day.
The future is usually quite different than anyone reasonably foresees. As long as we don’t get all excited and pull out our public transit (again) in a destructive orgy of new-tech love, we’ll be fine.