By Gord Price
The Sun has been running a series on the state of Motordom. Today: driverless cars, or AVs – automated vehicles.
A quote from Clark Lim, adjunct prof at UBC:
Lim foresees a future with lightweight electric engines and smaller, perhaps thinner models that save space; gaps on the roads between vehicles will be a thing of the past because computers see the world at 1,000 times a second — instant reaction times, in effect — and are able to tailgate without colliding, he says. “An autonomous car can drive very closely behind because there are instantaneous reactions,” he says.
Which means that they have to be failsafe, since even a single accident could have catastrophic consequences. And not just in lives and injuries. The liability consequences to the owner or those determined to be negligent would be financially catastrophic too.
So (1) how likely is it that all AVs will work perfectly all the time? And (2) in order to assure that AVs are as close to perfection as possible in design, construction and maintenance, how expensive will they have to be?
If only a minority of people and businesses can afford them (and especially to maintain them at liability-proof standards), how likely is it that they AVs will replace the far-less-than-perfect but affordable non-automated car in sufficient numbers for the above scenario to work?
And what happens to liability insurance for them?
Just asking.
I’ll believe all this hoopla about AVs when I see it. I know they won’t play a big role in my life. Nothing beats walkable neighbourhoods.
I don’t see this as an issue. Current guidelines, which many people don’t abide by, call for following distance of one car length for each 10 mph of speed. This is due to slow human reaction time of about 1/2 second. With reaction time of 1/1000 second, AVs could follow much closer than this. Bumper to bumper would be inadvisable due to possibility of mechanical or system failure. I see insurance cost for AVs being way lower than for human drivers since safety will be vastly improved. Already, Aimia is giving a 15% discount for insuring vehicles equipped with automatic braking.
https://www.insurancehotline.com/will-brake-for-auto-insurance-discounts/
People complain a lot about ICBC premiums, but I don’t even see a need for ICBC in a driverless future.
You’re missing the point. What happens when the vehicle control computer’s fuse blows just as the car ahead slams on its brakes? Right now it’s not a problem because even cars equipped with automatic braking also have the brake pedal hydraulically connected to the brakes – the computer can fail and the driver can still control the vehicle. But in a fully autonomous vehicle the driver may be sleeping, and so you can’t count him to save the day.
In aircraft, and in computer-controlled transit vehicles like Skytrain the answer is redundancy. In an autonomous vehicle that would mean redundant computers, sensors and actuators. The question is: how expensive, and will it be so much that it becomes an impediment to adoption?
That isn’t how fail-safe systems are designed. As a simple example, have the vehicle set up so that brakes are always applied, and have the computer release them to allow the vehicle to move. If the computer fails, the brakes are then automatically applied, since that is their normal state. It is like a Skytrain car that loses the signal to tell it the tracks are clear ahead. It doesn’t keep going to find out if they are or not, it stops.
… and the vehicle behind (which is functioning normally) would be able to stop.
I guess the constraint would be the physical requirements to come to a stop
– i.e. the braking system and road conditions.
You (or an AV) can’t always stop on a dime.
The AV would not drive any closer than the room required to stop if the vehicle ahead did so. Ditto for all following vehicles. Humans are not nearly as clever.
Presumably even AV vehicles would keep a safe stopping distance separation. This distance would be dependent on speed, stopping technology, maximum safe deceleration and road conditions (traction). This means large gaps between vehicles would continue to exist except at the slowest speeds….otherwise if one vehicle experiences failure it would become a massive chain reaction. Existing AV technologies like Skytrain (in a more controlled environment no less) follow these rules it is pretty obvious AV cars will need to as well.
The large gaps wouldn’t be required to the same extent if the vehicles were platooned, which implies that they are communicating with each other and functioning as a single (longer) vehicle, with coordinated acceleration and deceleration.
Oh, so basically they’d become a bus.
With a lot more embodied energy and space per passenger.
Agreed. But with fewer physical transfers between vehicles on a single journey.
All of this breathless orgasmic tech seems hellbent on maintaining private transportation, which would still require hundreds of billions in public infrastructure in this country, tens of trillions worldwide. That is, until supporters start recommending sharing your commute with others, then it seems very similar to public transport.
Where is the cost-benefit and energy consumption research between private and public transportation coupled with building more walkable communities regarding AV?
Then there are the commercial aspects, and supporter’s hyperbole starts to flow like the tide with truck trains. Well, that seems like an inferior copy of train trains which already offer very affordable intercity freight rates.
The jury is definitely out.
Probably because most people want to maintain their private transportation. Beats riding the Skytrain with a machete wielding psycho. It also relieves government of the burden of providing rolling stock and operators.
The thread is about automated vehicles. Why do you bring up operators?
Haven’t seen much psycho rage on Skytrain. But I see psycho road rage regularly.
Because Skytrain has a room full of operational personnel. Your grandma’s AV Buick won’t.
Operational personnel ….. Sounds like any traffic engineering department in any city, or the swollen MoTI and Chauvanist Road Bureaucracy under the BC Libs.
To each their own, but I find transit liberating. When it works, it gives me a wonderful sense of freedom. I find driving, in contrast, gives me a feeling of dependency and frequently (because of the psycho drivers Jeff mentions) of frustration.
I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way. But neither should you. Some say they don’t like transit and can’t imagine why anyone else would. The only things that reveals are a desire for conformity and a lack of imagination.
Interesting how some people consider sky train to be unsafe Fact is, it is probably by far the safest form of transportation around in spite of the very rare machete yielding psycho. Every year, about 2000 people in Canada are killed and 200,000 injured by road violence How many are injured or killed riding skytrain?
And Bob argues that AVs would be an improvement since they don’t require governments to acquire rolling stock and operators while ignoring the huge cost of building and maintaining streets and highways.
Safe, sure. Pleasant, not really. I can’t recall the last time I had to stand 30 minutes in my car. Or share the seat with someone who looked like they slept rough and reeked of urine. But no doubt others will convince themselves that’s the exciting spice of urbanism.
As to the cost of building and maintaining streets, the major road network is largely already built out at the municipal level. The factors that require most maintenance are your busses and the heavy trucks so beloved of developers building those glorious condos. And of course, the maintenance required because those same developers keep digging and redigging trenches across those roads.
You clearly don’t have a lot of experience with Vancouver’s rapid transit system, Bob. Or if you aren’t taking rhetorical flourishes and truly encounter a machete-wielding psycho or homeless person several times a week, then that means you seem to attract negativity. Call it Bob’s Law, kinda like Murphy’s Law.
I’ll concur about standing. However, 30 minutes will place you at the farouter reaches of the system. I’ll take my 6 minutes of standing at 80 km/hr on the Canada Line with the tourists, office workers, millennials, and stroller-pushing mums to downtown any day over 20 minutes driving and contending with road rage, parking rage and general, all-round driver’s cantankerousness.
It seems to me that the cost of a private AV would be more than a conventional car but the difference wouldn’t be much more when applied to a bus.The bus cost is divided by 40 or more riders making it significantly cheaper per person up front. But then there’s the high cost of the bus operator being eliminated as well.
I’d guess that AVs would benefit public transit (and commercial trucking) much much more than private commuting.
Q. Will it be affordable?
A. Not soon. The first generation will be expensive overall (capital plus maintenance). It will be much easier to create affordable 30-40km capable vehicles to steal taxi driver jobs that to create highway capable replacements for the suburban commuter vehicle.
Q. It is a good idea to allow scumbag corporations to create mass unemployment for fun and profit?
A. Depends on how big a fan of sci-fi distopia you are.
PS Happy Holidays!
The workplace is changing. Commuting is changing. Look at the airport or any hotel. Any airport has to be up and running by 5am, that means that many employees need to be there by 4am, before public transportation starts and many will be there after transit ends at night. That means private transport for a massive proportion of the employees. Same with any hotel. Same with many restaurants, bars and clubs. Same for all the cleaners. Etc. Nowadays fewer people go to factories and offices at regular times.
These days rush hour has become much more that two hours a day, it’s more like 7 or eight hours because people are moving around to staggered schedules.
With the zoning restrictions in central Vancouver forcing new residents to the outlying areas there would have to be massive rail infrastructure developments to affect private vehicle use. In Japan around 27% of public travel is by train, in the US it’s around 0.6%, Germany is around 7.7%. Metro Vancouver has a long way to go, both in higher population densities for viability and rail transit or rapid bus availability before usage can make any serious dent in road use by private vehicles.
A train or light-rail to UBC would be good but what about North Van, Delta, Surrey, Langley. They are not just going to fade away. Au contraire, they are all growing, fast.
It’s interesting (although barely relevant to the potential for AVs) how fast Vancouver is growing this year compared to the places that ‘fast growth’ is thought to be occurring.
In the first 11 months of the year, the City of Vancouver saw 9,503 new housing starts. North Van (City and District), Delta, Surrey, and Langley (City and District) added together were 6,452.
Burnaby, with 3,390 starts has seen more new construction in 2016 than Surrey.
90% of the Burnaby housing starts, and two thirds of the Surrey starts are multiples (so mostly apartments) rather than singles. Many – and probably most of those will be located in close proximity to transit
Those housing starts are great if only so many weren’t destined to become empty investment vehicles.
Is this like Scrabble – introducing irrelevant topics is like getting a triple word score?
Well if they’re empty investment vehicles in the City of Vancouver they’ll be paying much more in tax to help build more affordable housing. (If they’re foreign buyers they’ll be paying more tax to the Province who say they’ll also use it for affordable housing as well). And if they’re not living here, there should be more road space for the Automated Vehicles as well.
Empty investment vehicles …… you must be referring to the vast majority of condo investments that form a significant portion of the Metro rental supply. According to the best available information, less than 6% of Metro condos are empty for more than 6 months.
AirBnB presents challenges to rental stock, but the Web business owners are now responding to licencing requirements in several cities. It remains to be seen how strata boards will react.
Thank you for supplying the data to counter uninformed opinion.
That was directed to Changing City.
References please, Eric.