Autonomous Vehicles, Yay or Nay
Not if, but when
Majority of analysts agree that driverless cars would be in use across the globe by 2025 whether we like it or not. Historically, once humans have a technology, we will use it. The transition, however, will not be instantaneous because the total number of cars and trucks on the road is two billion and climbing. The capacity for car/truck production is about 100 million a year. So if tomorrow all production cars were autonomous, it would take 15 years to replace the fleet, assuming the fleet stayed the same size. Arguably it could be faster if more production processes were to become fully autonomous, but it would still be approximately 10 years from now.
Be aware of the risks
With self-driving technology, where it gets tricky for the car is that urban environment around 30 or 40 miles an hour. Right now it’s fairly easy to deal with things that are below 5 to 10 miles per hour because we can do that with the ultrasonics and LiDAR — we just make sure it doesn’t hit anything because the car can always brake in time. At 5–10 miles per hour you can stop within the range of the ultrasonics. Then from, 10 miles an hour to 50 miles an hour — that area in complex suburban environments — that’s where you can get a lot of unexpected things happening. Let’s say there’s a road closure or a manhole cover open, children playing is a big issue, and bicyclists! Once you get about 50 miles per hour and you’re in a freeway environment, it gets easier again. The set of possibilities is much reduced. Highway cruise is easy, low speed is easy, intermediate is hard. Being able to recognize what it’s seeing and make the right decision in that 10 to 50 miles per hour zone is the challenging portion. (Elon Musk 2015)
Human error vs. machine learning
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an estimated 32,675 people died in car crashes in 2014. The Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank, notes that “driver error is believed to be the main reason behind over 90 percent of all crashes” with drunk driving, distracted drivers, failure to remain in one lane and failing to yield the right of way the main causes. Because the majority of these accidents are caused by human error, self-driving cars could potentially reduce the rate of automobile-related deaths.
“In theory, if you have 100 percent fully autonomous vehicles on the road,” Hagemann says, “while you still might have accidents on the margin in rare situations, you’re basically looking at anywhere from a 95 to 99.99 percent reduction in total fatalities and injuries on the road.” According to the paper by Thierer and Hagemann, congestion caused drivers to spend an extra 5.5 billion hours on the road, costing them $121 billion for the 2.9 billion gallons of fuel.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has established a rating system that scores vehicles on their level of automation, on a scale of 0 (no automation) to 4 (fully automated). We already have features like cruise control, a technology that allows cars to stay in their lanes, autonomous braking, and self-parking sensors.
The cars cannot drive in heavy rain or snow, and they have a hard time making a left-hand turn when there is oncoming traffic. They also cannot read hand signals — say, for example, if a traffic cop was directing vehicles. While Simpson believes these issues will be solved over time, the technology at this stage, he says, is still very much in development.
Car hacks
In fact, you may not realize it, but if you’ve bought a car in the last few years, what you’re driving in today may already be vulnerable. Wired magazine published a frightening article detailing how journalist Andy Greenberg allowed a pair of hackers to take control of the Jeep Cherokee he was driving on the highway, first messing with his air conditioning and radio and eventually cutting out his transmission — and they did it sitting on a couch miles away, using an ordinary internet connection. It was possible because the Jeep, like so many cars today, is connected to the web via a system created by Chrysler; many other automakers have similar systems.
Public transportation
After three years of development, one of the leading Chinese bus manufacturers Yutong has sent the prototype of a self-driving city bus on a 32 km long circuit on an intercity road. The bus drove the whole track in regular traffic without any human assistance, attained a peak speed of 68 km/h, passed 26 traffic lights and was able to change lanes and overtake autonomously. Self-driving buses are very promising and will be a key ingredient of future mobility. On demand-buses will be able to service the complex mobility demands of our societies much better than today’s mix of scheduled buses, trains, and individual cars. They will lower the cost, resource consumption and ecological footprint of mobility.
Worldwide there are only very few efforts to develop autonomous trains. Being fixed to a track, trains are much better suited for autonomous operation than road-based vehicles. But most of the innovation in autonomous vehicles is occurring on the road. Although autonomous trains could significantly lower costs, increase capacity and flexibility, most railways are heavily regulated and are unlikely to adopt autonomous driving technology on long-distance trains soon. This is unfortunate because the extreme focus on safety actually prevents useful innovations from being adopted and pushes people to other transportation mediums such as the road — with much higher risks and casualty levels.
European Rail Transit Management System has laid some groundwork which could be leveraged for autonomous operation: ERTMS distinguishes four levels of train control: Levels 0 to 2 rely on standard trackside infrastructure for train control — including signs and balises (transponders embedded in the track which digitally transmit location and track constraint information to the train). But level 3 allows trains to localize themselves via sensor and retrieve track constraints and movement authority via mobile internet (GSM-Rail). This greatly increases flexibility and should simplify the introduction of autonomous railways on the many routes that are not yet equipped with automated train control infrastructure.
Final thoughts
In the U.S., 30,000 to 40,000 people die in traffic accidents every year. If — twenty years from now — we might look back from a situation where traffic accidents have fallen by more than a factor of five, then we will be able to state with certainty how many lives could have been saved if self-driving cars would have been introduced a few years earlier. We might find that people have lost their lives because governments and regulators did not realize the risk of delaying a highly beneficial technology and business and innovators were reluctant to advance the technology because of a climate of mistrust and skepticism with respect to the technology.
There are lives at stake both if we are too optimistic and too pessimistic over the possibilities of this technology. But the problem is not symmetric: If we are too pessimistic with respect to the potential of this technology, then we can easily find ourselves in a situation in the future where we find in hindsight that tens of thousands of lives have been lost because of this pessimism and the resulting delay of the introduction. On the other hand, if we are overly optimistic with regard to the technology, and accelerate innovation in this area, it is likely that thousands of lives will be lost because the cars do not perform as safely as expected.
If you enjoyed that, check out my latest series: Learn to code in multiplayer game.
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