Not Clear on the Concept

Retired General Motors executive Bob Lutz ruminated recently about the future of self-driving cars. He imagines “they’ll look like telephone booths laid down” and they won’t need to be streamlined “because they’ll be electronically linked in a seamless train on the freeway moving at say 200 mph.” This will happen in 15 to 25 years “depending on how quickly governments are willing to invest in the road technology needed for a fully automated. . . system to work.”

What Lutz is describing is Futurama, not the television show but the General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. That exhibit imagined that highways would have embedded infrastructure that vehicles could electronically read and follow to get to where their occupants wanted to go.

But that’s not how most auto and software manufacturers are designing their self-driving cars. Instead, as the Antiplanner has noted before, they assume that the government will provide no infrastructure other than what is already in place, and all of the electronics and software needed to guide the cars will be on board the vehicles themselves.

The difference is crucial, because if you believe in Lutz’s vision, then the government needs to spend a trillion dollars or so on infrastructure to make it work. If you believe the Google, independent-vehicle vision, then all investments will be made by the private sector and supported by the eventual purchases by private vehicle owners. Naturally, there are some high-tech firms salivating at the prospect of huge government spending, but it seems pointless and potentially counterproductive.

Another view of self-driving cars can be found in a report published by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (Canada). The report estimates it will be “a couple of decades” before fully self-driving cars are available in large numbers, and in the meantime most will be semi-autonomous. As a result, the report predicts that congestion will increase before truly self-driving cars make it better, so Canada (and, by implication, the United States) better build a lot more roads in the near future. That’s a pretty convenient conclusion for an organization made up of construction contractors.

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How does the “couple of decades” estimate from both Lutz and the Construction Alliance report square with Ford CEO Mark Fields’ promise to have fully self-driving cars, with no steering wheels or control pedals, on the road by 2021? The catch is that Fords cars will only go to places that have been mapped using high-definition 3D mapping. HERE, a company co-owned by BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen, says that it has mapped 1.2 million miles of roads. Ford has its own mapping company and its cars will presumably only go where it has made maps.

Other automakers will just provide the hardware, giving future auto buyers the ability to choose their own self-driving software and mapping service based on “coverage” in the same way people choose cell phone companies today. By around 2020, some of these companies will sell you a car that has a steering wheel and other controls but that can take over driving for you so long as you stay in a mapped area.

The Antiplanner has previously mentioned George Hotz, a software engineer who designed an add-on device to allow owners of certain Hondas to turn their cars into self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent him what he considered to be a threatening letter asking for proof that his device was safe. While that’s a reasonable request that anyone could make, the NHTSA also mentioned that failure to respond to the request could leave Hotz liable for $21,000 a day in civil penalties.

Hotz responded by backing out of the project here, though he says he may pursue it in China. It would be too bad if he quit because he had some good ideas. He should have been prepared to answer the government’s questions since, as I say, they are reasonable questions that anyone should ask a carmaker. Some think, however, NHTSA was being discriminatory in going after Hotz when it didn’t do the same for Tesla or other manufacturers of cars with semi-autonomous features.

Speaking of the NHTSA, it held a public meeting yesterday on its proposed policy towards automated vehicles. I understand the meeting just reviewed some of the comments that have been made on the 116-page policy document. The deadline for submitting public comments is November 22.