Letting Your Car Drive You from SFO to LA

Someone instructed their Tesla to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and it was able to do so without any driver intervention. The car even pulled off the highway and went to a charging station when its battery ran low.

I’ve noted before that Waymo and Tesla have two very different strategies for driverless cars. Waymo’s is basically to go into full-fledged driverless mode with the help of maps and remote monitors. Tesla’s is to incrementally improve their self-driving software until it can do everything by itself. Continue reading

Driverless Car Update

San Francisco may soon have two self-driving taxi services as Waymo and Cruise have applied to begin such operations in May. Perhaps not coincidentally, this has been accompanied by a spate of complaints that self-driving cars have been unable to deal with San Francisco’s fog, are delaying buses, and unexpectedly stop in the middle of traffic.

Meanwhile, in London, Bill Gates recently tested an experimental driverless car developed by a company called Wayve and was very happy with the results. Unlike Cruise and Waymo’s cars, which depend heavily on detailed maps of roads and terrain, the London cars just learn to deal with traffic like any human driver. That means that, once they can drive in London, they’ll be able to drive in any city in Great Britain without any further preparatory work. Continue reading

Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

Tesla released what it calls “full self-drive beta” software to selected Tesla owners last week, and while it does not really make a Tesla into a true driverless car, it works pretty well under most conditions and provides a glimpse of what driverless cars will be like in the near future.

Tesla has taken a different approach to autonomy from other manufacturers. While Waymo, Ford, and GM driverless cars rely heavily on extremely precise maps, which means they can only be used within “geofenced” (i.e., mapped) areas, Elon Musk has criticized this approach. In technical terms, an autonomous car that relies on maps is called a level 4 vehicle while Tesla wants to go straight to level 5, meaning a vehicle that can go anywhere based on the geography that it detects with on-board sensors. Continue reading

A Matter of Trust

Ford Motor Company issued a report last week explaining its self-driving car program and why it won’t kill pedestrians like the Uber car did in Arizona. Among other things, Ford has two people in its test cars at all times, one watching the road and the other monitoring the self-driving system (Uber’s car had only one person who was watching a video at the time of the accident).

Click image to download this 37.4-MB PDF.

The Antiplanner likes Ford and wishes it well, but I can’t help but think that this “go-slow-for-safety” approach is merely an excuse for being three years behind Waymo and two years behind General Motors in the race to put self-driving ride-hailing systems on the streets. Ford promises to mass produce self-driving cars by 2021, but GM says it will have them by 2019 and Waymo expects to put such cars in revenue service this year. Continue reading

Waymo Gearing Up

Waymo will order up to 62,000 plug-in hybrid minivans from Chrysler for its driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo already has 600 such minivans that it is testing in Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The 62,000 Chryslers are on top of the 20,000 electric cars that Waymo announced in March that it was planning to buy from Jaguar. Waymo says it expects to have all of these vehicles fully deployed by 2022 at the latest. Continue reading

Prediction: 95% of 2030 Travel by Self-Driving Cars

“By 2030,” says a new report from a group that calls itself RethinkX, “95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals.” The Antiplanner is more optimistic about the rapid growth of self-driving cars than most, but RethinkX’s prediction is more dramatic than anything the Antiplanner has said.

As recognized in this more moderate report from UC Davis, RethinkX’s statement is really three predictions in one: first, about self-driving cars; second, about what powers those cars; and third, about who owns those cars. I think 95 percent by 2030 is optimistic for any one of these predictions, much less all of them.

First, the decision about what powers cars is completely, 100 percent independent of the decision about whether humans or computers drive cars. So long as the United States gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels, even natural gas, the environmental benefits from converting to electric cars is negligible, especially since we can make gasoline-powered cars more fuel-efficient. Continue reading

Only the Government

Only the government would complain when the number of customers using one of its services grows. At least, that’s the case with an article about the increase in freight traffic as UPS, FedEx, and other shipping companies make more deliveries due to on-line sales. Supposedly, a “siege of delivery trucks is threatening to choke cities with traffic.” If roads were properly priced, of course, this wouldn’t be a problem–but if they were properly priced, the transit lobby wouldn’t be able to steal $16 billion a year from highway user fees.

In a statement sometimes attributed to Will Rogers but whose true author is unknown, someone said, “the solution to congestion is for government to make cars and business to build the roads.” Whoever said this understood that government tends to create shortages of things that people want, while private businesses tend to create plenty.

Speaking of private businesses, Waymo–the new name for the spin-off company developing Google’s self-driving cars–is inviting residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area to apply to be among 500 “early riders.” The company will loan 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to families to try out. Apparently, this is on top of cars that have already been loaned to 100 families in the area.

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Backstabbing in the Self-Driving Car Industry

Bloomberg has a long article about Google’s lawsuit against Uber over self-driving car technology. In a nutshell, one of Google’s top engineers, Anthony Levandowski, left Google to start a new company called Otto that was then purchased by Uber for $700 million, and Google is accusing Levandowski of taking its company secrets with him and giving them to Uber.

The real story, though, is not over patent disputes but a debate in the industry over how to introduce the new technology to the market. This debate has to do with the distinction engineers are making between self-driving cars and driverless cars. Advocates of self-driving cars, meaning cars that can increasingly drive themselves but sometimes need humans to take over, argue that this stage is needed to collect as much information as possible to perfect the technology.

On the other hand are advocates of driverless cars, meaning cars that never need a human operator, who argue that not only is the self-driving phase not needed, but that it could be dangerous because a self-driving car may not be able to alert on-board humans that they need to take over in time for them to do so.

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Intel, California Want to Be Players in the Autonomous Car Races

Add Intel to the list of companies working on self-driving cars. It just spent $15.3 billion purchasing Mobileye, a manufacturer of sensors used in autonomous cars. Intel’s CEO says he expects to have a complete hardware package ready for auto makers in 2024. Considering Ford’s promise to have fully autonomous cars on the road by 2021, that might be late, or it might just be more realistic.

Meanwhile, after much criticism from the industry, California has revised its proposed rules for self-driving cars. The original rules did not provide any possibility for testing of cars that did not allow a human override. This led Google and other companies to migrate their testing operations to Texas and other friendlier states.

Most states still don’t have any laws providing for self-driving cars, but because the people who wrote those laws never conceived of the possibility, most states also don’t outlaw them. Arizona, for example, has no law, and the governor “welcomes them with open arms.”

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Benefits & Costs Benefits of Autonomous Cars

A new study estimates that self-driving cars will save the United States more than $300 billion per year. The study adds up the costs of traffic accidents and assumes that self-driving cars will reduce accidents by 90 percent. That’s optimistic, but the study doesn’t even count the savings due to congestion relief, increased productivity while traveling, and the reduced cost of delivering goods and services.

On the other hand, one analyst estimates that self-driving cars will “wipe out 4 million jobs.” A taxi- and limo-driver lobby group has already begun to lobby the New York legislature to protect jobs by banning self-driving cars.

This is where it is important to understand the difference between benefits and costs. Jobs are not a benefit; income is the benefit. Jobs are costs: if more income can be produced with fewer jobs, everybody gains. That includes the people whose jobs are lost because–at least if the society is reasonably mobile–they can find better jobs instead, paid for out of the money people saved by reducing costs.

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