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When The New Yorker tackles a subject, one pays attention. After reading the cartoons.
In this case: Has the self-driving car at last arrived? by Burkhard Bilger.
Excerpts:
Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault …. Someday soon, a self-driving car will save your life.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, told me:
“As you look outside, and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates,” Brin said. “It’s a huge tax on the land.” Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they’re parked on the street or in driveways and garages.
But if cars could drive themselves, there would be no need for most people to own them. A fleet of vehicles could operate as a personalized public-transportation system, picking people up and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls. They’d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis—by some calculations, they’d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars—and far more flexible than buses or subways.
Streets would clear, highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland. “We’re not trying to fit into an existing business model,” Brin said. “We are just on such a different planet.” …
… the manufacturers are much more pessimistic about the technology. “It’ll happen, but it’s a long way out,” John Capp, General Motors’ director of electrical, controls, and active safety research, told me. “It’s one thing to do a demonstration—‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ But I’m talking about real production variance and systems we’re confident in. Not some circus vehicle.”
When I went to visit the most recent International Auto Show in New York, the exhibits were notably silent about autonomous driving. … like the other exhibitors, he avoided terms like “self-driving.” “We don’t even include it in our vocabulary,” Alan Hall, a communications manager at Ford, told me. “Our view of the future is that the driver remains in control of the vehicle. He is the captain of the ship.” …
Google … engineers know that a driverless car will have to be nearly perfect to be allowed on the road. “You have to get to what the industry calls the ‘six sigma’ level—three defects per million,” Ken Goldberg, the industrial engineer at Berkeley, told me. “Ninety-five per cent just isn’t good enough.” …
Still, sooner or later, a driverless car will kill someone. A circuit will fail, a firewall collapse, and that one defect in three hundred thousand will send a car plunging across a lane or into a tree. “There will be crashes and lawsuits,” Dean Pomerleau said. “And because the car companies have deep pockets they will be targets, regardless of whether they’re at fault or not. It doesn’t take many fifty- or hundred-million-dollar jury decisions to put a big damper on this technology.” Even an invention as benign as the air bag took decades to make it into American cars, Pomerleau points out. “I used to say that autonomous vehicles are fifteen or twenty years out. That was twenty years ago. We still don’t have them, and I still think they’re ten years out.” …
The Google car drives more defensively than people do: it tailgates five times less, rarely coming within two seconds of the car ahead. Under the circumstances, Levandowski says, our fear of driverless cars is increasingly irrational. “Once you make the car better than the driver, it’s almost irresponsible to have him there,” he says. “Every year that we delay this, more people die.” …
The reality was so close that he could envision each step: The first cars coming to market in five to ten years. Their numbers few at first—strange beasts on a new continent—relying on sensors to get the lay of the land, mapping territory street by street. Then spreading, multiplying, sharing maps and road conditions, accident alerts and traffic updates; moving in packs, drafting off one another to save fuel, dropping off passengers and picking them up, just as Brin had imagined. For once it didn’t seem like a fantasy.
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I don’t understand why shared cars would use less fuel, since they will have the added burden of having to “deadhead” from one trip to the next. Personal cars only have to drive exactly where the user wants them to go and no more.
The liability issues are going to be the big thing holding back autonomous cars. Because of this, the cars will be designed to drive very conservatively, certainly during the (likely quite long) phase-in period where they have to share the road with manually driven vehicles. So I’m not seeing where they are going to cut down on road space or congestion, at least not for a long time.
Autonomous vehicles (once the technology has matured) can draft each other, accelerate at controlled rates, plan ahead for braking based on signals from vehicles ahead of them, and so on. Those features contribute to operating savings in fuel. Design-related savings could include being lighter due to crash and safety features being designed into the control algorithms; vehicles could be much lighter if they didn’t carry heavy bumpers, air bags, impact absorbing steel, and so on. Route-related savings can come from the vehicle dropping the passenger where they want to go, and then going off itself to park. No circling for parking. Also, routes can be recalculated to avoid congestion.
A lot of what you’ve written assumes that the hardware and software in these cars will work perfectly with no concerns for liability or safety even when operated in a mix of autonomous and manually-operated vehicles in an world where random surprises like loads coming loose can happen. I’m very, very skeptical that this sort of thing is going to happen anytime soon.
Robotaxis will share the road with HDVs until at least 2050, so these advantages are a way out.
The assumption that vehicles will ‘deadhead’ in the first place is not necessarily valid. The initial waves of these systems will likely require that a human being be present whenever the vehicle is in motion, someone with a valid driver’s license at that. So they will not necessarily be roving the streets in search of their next fare like a human taxi driver.
Even once the switch is made to 100% autonomous vehicles deadheading can still be managed and indeed, there will be an economic reason for both companies and users to minimize deadheading time. Deadhead costs will be passed onto the customers, of course, but to help keep prices down and competitive, companies will develop ways to minimize those costs. Customers may also be motivated to (for example) walk a few blocks to reach their cars rather than having them come to them. This also depends a great deal on what the fuel sources are for these cars as well and the economics of thereof.
That being said, we already ‘deadhead’ our personal vehicles a fair amount as is. Parents going to pick-up children, or giving rides to friends, or engaging in all sorts of other behaviour that we don’t count as ‘deadheading’ since we’re in our own vehicle, but is for all practical purposes the same thing: we’re only going somewhere to collect someone or something and our only actual purpose in the vehicle is to serve as it’s guidance system. The aggregate behaviour of computer coordinated deadheading may ultimately prove more efficient than our current private vehicle deadheading.
Deadheading: not if it’s a pick-up, like taking the kids to soccer practice.
And: fuel? What is this, 1970? Cars are electric now, haven’t you heard? And the ability to go charge themselves (or roll up gently to your door, from nearby) is absolutely the killer app for e-Car2Go.
Can’t wait.
“the cars will be designed to drive very conservatively … so I’m not seeing where they are going to cut down on road space or congestion”
Odd non-sequitur there. Is congestion reduced by aggressive driving? I thought it was reduced by land use and mode mix (which robotaxis will go a long way to facilitate).
While I’m a big proponent of the ability of robot-taxis to stop the ongoing worldwide catastrophe happening on our streets and highways, and they have the potential to help manage some of the environmental issues we’re facing, robot-taxis could actually perpetuate the sprawl paradigm onto the next few generations.
This is a big part of the reason why I think that the Christy Clark’s re-election is nothing short of a massive disaster for the Lower Mainland and BC in general.
Christy Clark is doubling down on sprawl and sprawl supporting infrastructure and basically planning to kill transit expansion for the next decade. Even assuming that she’s defeated in 2017, they’ll be projects still in progress, commitments made that future governments will not be able to easily back out of. Restarting transit planning and construction will take time. And if it’s the NDP that forms the next Government, well, they also aren’t above playing asphalt politics (Island Highway anyone?) when they think that will score them points.
And along comes the technology that could potentially make living in the suburbs with long commutes palatable to the next generation.
It may not be their first choice, it may not be what the next generation wants but as we’ve seen it’s really hard to change directions and something like the coming of the auto-autos could erode the political resistance just enough that next generation gets stuck with the same bad paradigm as the last.
The technology is coming and we can’t (nor shouldn’t) stop it, especially with its capacity to save lives and improve our safety.
However, technology is not destiny and Christy Clark isn’t unstoppable. I hope.
@jack “It may not be their first choice, it may not be what the next generation wants but as we’ve seen it’s really hard to change directions”
I’m more optimistic, for two reasons:
– As you imply, the end of the suburban experiment is about resurgent demand for all the benefits of good walkable, car-last urbanism. That demand won’t go away.
– A big part of nimbyism is people self-identifying as drivers, once they’ve sunk the cost of the car. If we can avoid that, by putting the robotaxi’s transaction cost up front (even waiting a minute or two for it to show up) then they’ll start to demand or allow more proximate services that are more pleasant to walk to.
@neil21, I definitely hope that you’re right and I’m being overly pessimistic but when people are trying to juggle competing desires only some of those get translated into demands that people are willing to back with political action or through their economic choices. Auto-autos plus token urbanism might just negate the real demand for a shift to genuine urban living. My concern is the timing. Christy Clark seems to have committed herself and her government wholeheartedly to Motordom abandoning the fig leafs that the BC Liberals used to maintain on the public transit and urbanist fronts.
Even if you’re right that the technology will inherently tend to undermine sprawl, the course that the provincial government sets now could still lead to years and years of new sprawl before that kicks in. It may be more compact sprawl and sprawl that will require less retrofitting in the future. That would be an improvement over what is currently built when we create new sprawl but it will still be eating into a very limited supply of land.
Technology always depends on how you use it. Technologies that may be used constructively against sprawl (such as LRT) can sometimes fuel it too if you don’t lock down the land use policy. Locking down the land use policy needs to be done now if we’re going to avoid a resurgence of sprawl in the early years of autopiloted cars.
It will be the insurance and liability factors that will drive human drivers off the roads (at least outside of closed tracks for driving enthusiasts) ultimately. Insurance companies will simply not insure non-autonomous vehicles, or will charge enormous rates on human drivers.
Liability works both ways: if a human driver is found to be responsible for an accident and had, for example, switched off the auto-pilot system what sort of liability might that driver be facing?
Even if the end result of this is that traveling on our roadways becomes a lot like flying (extremely safe relative to any other mode, with the occasional spectacular accident) the actuarial tables are still going to come out in favour of the auto-auto. Probably overwhelmingly so.
The bigger issues are whether or not governments will actually let auto-autos be insured appropriately. Given that current elected governments largely represent motorists and their interests (at the expense of our environment, livability, personal safety…) I could easily see some governments insisting that their be parity between autonomous and non-autonomous cars. This may sound cynical, but frankly, as boomers have moved into positions of power we seem to have moved to government by nostalgia rather than government by data.
The most likely delay to the rollout of auto-autos is not technological development (with all of its capacity to save lives) but instead the tendency of current governments, to legislate based on the world they wish existed, rather than the world as it is.
Which is why Vancouver and BC will be no where near the vanguard of this lifesaving development, sadly.
I love the term “government by nostalgia”
Now that we have leaders my age I’ve noticed that they’re not basing their decision making on the world that existed when we were kids or young adults. Instead our politicians make decisions based on the fictional world of pop culture. They see a time before they were born, circumstances that never existed and situations that aren’t relevant today, yet somehow they still expect the same convenient happy ending.