Tag Archives: self-driving cars

Self-driving car technology is rapidly advancing. Tesla reports that its customers have driven more than 100 million miles with “autopilot,” which controls speed and steers the cars in traffic. The few accidents that it has reported quickly led to software upgrades to make sure similar accidents didn’t happen.

Volvo says its cars will have a similar autopilot technology next year, and promises fully self-driven cars–which it hopes will also be “fatality-free”–by 2020. It is about to begin conducting what it claims is the largest trial of self-driving cars to date; the tests will take place in China, England, and Sweden.

Uber is testing a self-driving car in Pittsburgh. The ride-sharing company just received a $3.5 billion infusion of cash from Saudi Arabia. Some people are unhappy that a country that won’t let women drive is investing in an American auto company, but maybe the Saudis see self-driving cars as a way to provide equal mobility for everyone.

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Sorting fact from fancy and fear isn’t always easy. In just the past three days we’ve heard all three about self-driving cars. First, Duke University roboticist Missy Cummings testified before Congress that auto companies were “rushing to market” before self-driving cars are ready, and “someone is going to die.” “Many of the sensors on self-driving cars are not reliable in good weather, in urban canyons, or places where the map databases are out of date,” she explained in arguing for federal standards for self-driving technology.

No one argues that the technology is ready today and no one argues that it will reduce fatalities to zero. Cummings may have been trying to say that a car with no features other than adaptive cruise control and lane centering will encourage drivers to fall asleep in the back seat, but it isn’t clear how federal regulation would prevent that since those technologies are already available on many cars.

Ironically, just a few days before, Ford explained how its self-driving cars would overcome all of the problems cited by Cummings. As the Antiplanner described a few months ago, Ford and other companies are relying heavily on precise maps that can be automatically updated every time an appropriately equipped car drives down a particular route (which can then update the maps for other cars). If an occupant wants to take an unmapped route, the self-driving car would refuse to go there without a human driver. This would solve all of Cummings’ issues without government intervention.

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You can build a self-driving car in your garage–if you are a computer genius. George Hotz, a 26-year-old computer whiz who was the first person to unlock the iPhone when he was just 17 and later reverse engineered a PlayStation, has built a self-driving car. Though it has cost him about $50,000, most of which went for the car itself, his real goal is to design a hardware/software system that will turn any recent car into a self-driving car for very little money.

As described in the video above, rather than write a computer program with a zillion rules for driving, his method has been to teach his car how to drive by using other drivers as examples. Most self-driving cars use millions of lines of code; his uses just 2,000. Continue reading →

As a part of his 2017 budget proposal, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx proposes to spend $4 billion on self-driving vehicle technology. This proposal comes late to the game, as private companies and university researchers have already developed that technology without government help. Moreover, the technology Foxx proposes is both unnecessary and intrusive of people’s privacy.

In 2009, President Obama said he wanted to be remembered for promoting a new transportation network the way President Eisenhower was remembered for the Interstate Highway System. Unfortunately, Obama chose high-speed rail, a 50-year-old technology that has only been successful in places where most travel was by low-speed trains. In contrast with interstate highways, which cost taxpayers nothing (because they were paid for out of gas taxes and other user fees) and carry 20 percent of all passenger and freight travel in the country, high-speed rail would have cost taxpayers close to a trillion dollars and carry no more than 1 percent of passengers and virtually no freight.

The Obama administration has also promoted a 120-year-old technology, streetcars, as some sort of panacea for urban transportation. When first developed in the 1880s, streetcars averaged 8 miles per hour. Between 1910 and 1966, all but six American cities replaced streetcars with buses that were faster, cost half as much to operate, and cost almost nothing to start up on new routes. Streetcars funded by the Obama administration average 7.3 miles an hour (see p. 40), cost twice as much to operate as buses, and typically cost $50 million per mile to start up.

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Tesla says that next year its cars will not only steer themselves within a lane, they will change lanes to pass slower vehicles when it is safe to do so. While other high-end cars, such as the Mercedes S-class, can steer themselves (“lane centering”), Tesla is the first to promise automatic lane changing.

San Ramon, California may see the nation’s first self-driving buses next year. The buses will operate in an office park called Bishop’s Ranch. While their range will initially be limited, they will use existing infrastructure, which means all of the people who have been dreaming of pod cars should pack up their bags and go home. Pod cars and similar personal-rapid transit devices would, like Contra Cost County’s self-driving buses, have a limited range, but would require expensive new infrastructure to work at all.

Volvo’s CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has so much confidence in his company’s progress towards completely automated vehicles that he says the company would accept full liability for any accidents that were the fault of its cars. (Google and Mercedes have made similar promises.) At the same time, Sanuelsson has urged the United States government to impose national guidelines on the states for self-driving cars. The Antiplanner isn’t so sure; I’d rather have 50 different state laws, some good and some bad with the bad ones learning from the good, than one national rule that is almost certain to be bad with little opportunity to learn because there are no other sets of rules in other states.

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60 Minutes covered self-driving cars last Sunday and CBS News took a look at Mercedes’ vision of the car of the future. General Motors, which cut its R&D when it went bankrupt in 2008, now plans to get into self-driving cars in a big way.

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Tight-lipped Apple is rumored to be developing a self-driving car; at least, it is meeting the California DMV about getting a license for one. Toyota, which has been less enthusiastic about self-driving cars than many other companies, now promises to have them in the showrooms by 2020.

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