Will the Feds Sideline Driverless Cars?

“Feds ask states to sideline driverless cars,” warns Forbes magazine. That’s actually a bit of a stretch. What the 14-page report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “recommends” is that states authorize self-driving cars for testing only, and that states that want to permit “non-testing operation of self-driving vehicles” should at least require that a licensed driver be in the driver’s seat ready to take over if the car reaches a situation it can’t handle. That’s pretty much what is happening anyway.

As Wired magazine notes, “the feds have no clue how to legislate autonomous cars,” mainly because they are “far behind the times . . . with regard to emerging technology.” The feds “want rules, but don’t want to inhibit innovation; they don’t want to pass laws at the federal level (just yet), but don’t want individual states going it alone.”

The federal government once funded research into driverless cars, but ignominiously cancelled the program in 1998 for specious reasons. The administration in 1998, as today, had an anti-auto agenda, so the Antiplanner wouldn’t trust the feds to oversee driverless car programs. They would probably insist on more central control and then do what they could to sabotage the program.

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More Automakers Move Toward Self-Driving Cars

Lexus cautiously presented its work towards a self-driving car at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. Audi has taken the bolder step of obtaining a Nevada license for its self-driving car. Tire maker Continental has also entered the field.

Lexus (which of course is owned by Toyota) is advertising its technology as more of a “co-pilot” that will take over driving in case of what it judges to be an emergency. “Our vision isn’t necessarily a car that drives itself,” said executive Mark Templin, “but rather a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” That’s an important intermediate step that will make driving safer, but it won’t have the revolutionary effects that truly autonomous cars will bring.

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So who will dominate the self-driving auto field? Google hopes that automakers will provide the hardware and let it provide the software. But
the fact that both an automaker and an auto parts company are actively working on self-driving technology shows that the future of self-driving cars is still anyone’s game.

Jerry Brown Tries the Google Car

California Governor Jerry Brown rode in a self-driving car with Google co-founder Sergey Brin on their way to Google headquarters, where Brown signed legislation creating a framework for introducing driverless cars into California by 2015. Meanwhile, automakers are incrementally automating driving with the introduction of a variety of new technologies.

On October 23, Volvo and the Embassy of Sweden are co-sponsoring a Washington, DC seminar to discuss the policy implications of autonomous vehicles. The seminar will include speakers from Volvo, Google, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Center for Automotive Research. The Antiplanner can’t make it, but readers in the Washington DC area may want to reserve a spot.

Volvo’s contribution to the technology focuses on road trains, in which a lead vehicle is driven by a professional and other vehicles can follow without active drivers. The system has been tested in Spain with just 20-foot gaps between vehicles. Volvo hopes the system will also improve fuel economy by about 20 percent.
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New Report on Self-Driving Cars

The Center for Automotive Research and KPMG have published a new report predicting the self-driving cars may be on the market as soon as 2019–if, however, the government takes action aimed at improving auto safety.

The report notes there are two approaches to self-driving cars. One, which it calls the “sensor-based solution,” is represented by the Google car and requires that each car have all sensors on board to detect everything in its surroundings. The other approach, which the report calls “connectivity based solutions,” relies on car-to-car (C2C) and car-to-infrastructure (C2I) communications to help cars navigate.

The report suggests that sensor-based solutions are “not cost-effective for mass market adoption” and require far better maps of streets and highways. It is true, as previously noted here, that the the “light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) device mounted on top of the Google car and other self-driving cars currently costs about $70,000. But that cost may come down, and Google seems committed to mapping the nation, state-by-state, to standards that self-driving cars will require.

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300,000 Miles — Availability by 2017

Google says that its self-driving cars have now gone 300,000 miles with no accidents (except once when one of the cars was rear-ended at a stoplight).

Google released the above video a few months ago in celebration of reaching 200,000 miles. Everything in it seems normal until the car parks in a handicapped parking spot. I thought, “Whoa! Google is going to have to teach its cars not to use those spots.” Then the video revealed that the “driver” was, in fact, “well passed legally blind.” It was a moving demonstration of how self-driving cars will change our lives.

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Brookings Discovers Driverless Cars

Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston points out in the Wall Street Journal that driverless cars will render high-speed rail and urban real transit even more obsolete than they already are. The Antiplanner, of course, brought driverless cars to the attention of WSJ readers two years ago.

Winston’s major point is that, rather than build high-speed rail, we should concentrate on rebuilding and redesigning our highway system to prepare for the increased driving that this new technology will inevitably bring about. He proposes, for example, to create more highways dedicated to cars rather than open to both cars and trucks. Such roads could be built with thinner pavement and narrower lanes. This might make sense, though the benefits of having multiple kinds of vehicles sharing the costs of the same infrastructure seem very high.
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Some states simply refuse to consider the effects this new technology will have on travel habits. Oregon, for example, has proposed a 2050 strategic transportation plan that counts on getting people out of their cars and onto transit, leaving the highways for trucks. This simply is not going to happen, but never underestimate the ability of Oregon planners to substitute their own fantasies for reality.

Two Driverless Models

After demonstrating its driverless car to Nevada’s governor, Google obtained the first official license for a self-driving car.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Volvo is pursuing the convoy model of driverless cars. In this model, a human-driven truck or bus takes the lead and anyone whose car has the appropriate technology can follow with the cars being driven by signals from the lead vehicle.

That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it will go very far. People won’t want to pay for the added hardware in their cars until there are a lot of highways with a lot of professionally driven vehicles providing the lead service. Trucking companies will have little incentive to add the electronics their trucks would need to become lead vehicles, which means government will need to subsidize it. Until lots of cars have the equipment needed to take advantage of those services, governments will have little incentive to provide the subsidies.

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Toodling Around DC in the Google Car

The Google car is in Washington, DC, and the Antiplanner managed to hitch a ride around downtown. My host, Anthony Levandowski–sometimes driving, sometimes just sitting in the driver’s seat–answered a number of questions about the car.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz stands next to the Google Prius. In addition to the spinning laser sensor on top of the car, note the infrared sensors in the front bumper (there’s a similar one in the center of the back bumper). The laser sensor finds nearby objects while the infrared sensors can detect objects much further away. Click on any photo for a larger view.

He said the car and hardware cost about $100,000, but Google has just a handful of them. When they go into mass production, he estimated an ordinary car could be retrofitted for a couple of thousand dollars. Some cars already have many of the sensors the Google car uses, so the cost of retrofitting such cars would be much lower.

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Semi-Driverless Cars Available Soon

Continental Automotive, a company that makes tires and other parts, has put together a semi-driverless car for Nevada. Under the rules in that state, which legalized driverless cars last year, a car must successfully go 10,000 miles without an accident before being marketed in the state. Continental’s car, which is based on a Volkswagen Passat, should pass that mark this week.

Continental’s car is not completely driverless. Instead, it takes over the driving on an urban or rural highway, steering within the lanes, keeping pace with traffic, and avoiding collisions with other vehicles. A human driver has to take over to change lanes or exit the highway.
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Still, this is a good first step. While the Google driverless car is equipped with an expensive, spinning laser beam that detects all other objects in a 360-degree circle around the car, the Continental car uses lower-cost sensors that are already standard on many high-end cars. Once certified in Nevada, it is likely that a car like this will be on the market in a couple of years.

Self-Driving Cars in the Pipeline

The hit of last week’s Detroit Auto Show was the 2013 Ford Fusion. This was a surprise because the car was merely a stylistic upgrade of an existing model.

The real significance of the Fusion is not the “strong personality” or the fact that Ford will offer both hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions, but that it is the first moderate-priced (under $30,000) car to offer key technologies on the road to driverless cars: adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, self-parking, and collision avoidance. While Ford’s versions of these technologies are weak in that they don’t actually drive the car, when combined with an enhanced GPS navigation system, it is likely that all that will be needed to turn the 2013 Fusion into a totally self-driving car will be a software upgrade.

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