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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The real issue is one of marketing. A company that is willing to put a self-driving car on the market will be able to earn revenues before a company that insists on waiting until it has a completely driverless car. Tesla and Uber are going the self-driving route; by going the driverless route, Google could be making itself irrelevant. As one expert told Bloomberg, “Google is the Xerox Parc of self-driving cars”; in other words, a company that invents new technology but doesn’t get to make any money from it.
But there’s no guarantee that will happen. The flip side is that a company that puts self-driving cars on the market, either for sale or as a shared-driving service, risks accidents that lead to lawsuits that could be fatal to the company selling the technology. That’s a danger to any car company, but could be a particular problem if they don’t solve the question of a transition from self driving to human driving.
Some see Levandowski, in particular, as reckless, making the joke that the motto at Otto was “safety third.” When Uber bought Otto and put Levandowski in charge, several engineers left Uber’s team and started their own companies. One of those companies was purchased by Ford, which has put itself firmly in the driverless camp by promising totally driverless cars by 2021. In the end, it is probably a good thing for consumers that major companies are developing both technologies.
The biggest problem I see with self-driving is that it’s a two edged sword. I’ve rented a few Toyotas with their first gen / beta version / whatever where it’ll beep at you if you come up on a car too fast, cruise control slows down automatically to match the car in the lane ahead, has the lane assist along with beeping if you’re leaving the lane. It’s helpful but the problem for many will be, especially in a beefed up version that handles the decision making even more is that it makes it easier to do things other than driving. I’m not sure how you render a person nearly useless and not have them doze off unintentionally or kill time browsing facebook. There’s going to be a lot people in the drivers seat completely unready to take over in the few situations where the system decides it’s warranted. At least that’s my two-bits worth.
I don’t understand the idea of “self-driving” cars – as you describe them. At what point, exactly, will a computer that can recognize a potential risk decide that a human can handle the risk better than the computer can? When will it ever be better to transfer to the driver? Is this just when there’s a malfunction, or the computer is confused by conflicting inputs or things like fog?