Despite all the hype around Google, Uber and Tesla, this report from Navigant Research says GM, Ford, Daimler, Nissan and BMW are leading the race to bring self-driving cars to market. Waymo (Google), Hyundai, Toyota and Tesla are in the middle of the pack, while Honda and Uber are bringing up the rear. To me, it’s an interesting example of how big, powerful, but stodgy corporations can innovate when they are threatened by small upstart players. I wouldn’t have predicted the Detroit companies would pull it off, or that the big Asian players would lag behind. I also thought we might see some partnerships between traditional car companies and tech companies, but the car companies seem to be developing the tech on their own.
I suppose there are people out there who don’t know that. But are they people who read newspapers?
Anyway, Obama appears to be a fan of self-driving cars:
In the seven-and-a-half years of my presidency, self-driving cars have gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality with the potential to transform the way we live.
Right now, too many people die on our roads – 35,200 last year alone – with 94 percent of those the result of human error or choice. Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year…
Even as we focus on the safety of automated vehicles, we know that this technology, as with any new technology, has the potential to create new jobs and render other jobs obsolete. So it’s critical that we also provide new resources and job training to prepare every American for the good-paying jobs of tomorrow.
It’s interesting to measure technological progress in Presidential terms. This is a major technological advance that happened fast, and yet, like most advances, we get used to it so fast we kind of think we saw it coming all along. But many of us remember where we were and what we were thinking about the year Obama got elected, and I don’t remember thinking much about self-driving cars. And if I was mentioning them to friends, I was getting laughed at. Of course, now it turns out those friends knew it all along. What am I predicting for the next eight years. Perhaps we will all have pet glow-in-the-dark woolly mini-mammoths. Or maybe not, but I don’t think exotic genetically engineered pets would be far out of the realm of possibility. You heard it here first.
Planetizen says autonomous vehicles won’t lead to more sprawl.
While we recognize the synergies AVs have with transit (something that is likely to be impacted by the technologythat we will discuss in the future), we do not share the belief that AVs will cause a new, unprecedented wave of sprawl. Rather, growing patterns of sprawl and longer “super-commutes” are unlikely outcomes of AVs for three key reasons: 1) the presence of existing land use, transportation, and infrastructure controls and growth management plans; 2) trends in housing consumption and residential preferences; and 3) social dynamics and the emergence of more informed decision-making.
I think the biggest effect of autonomous vehicles within urban areas will be on parking. At the moment, we have enormous numbers of parked vehicles taking up enormous amounts of space right where we are trying to live, work, and shop. With autonomous vehicles, we should either be able to share them, meaning a smaller number of vehicles in motion more of the time rather than parked, or if we really still want to own them, they can go park themselves in out-of-the-way places and come get us when we call them. This could lead to some very vibrant, social, creative, green urban areas.
I can also imagine some people will choose to live completely cloistered lives where they are sitting in comfortable vehicles several hours a day while going to and from work, or going to far-away vacation homes on the weekend. You could even imagine people choosing to live full-time in autonomous RVs.
In killer robot news, there is a drone now that can roam around on its own and kill by injecting poison with a needle. No, it’s still not Ray Bradbury’s mechanical hound, which I am still expecting any day now. This one is roaming the Great Barrier Reef murdering starfish.
I still find it just a tiny bit disturbing. But I also wondered if chemical pesticides could be replaced by tiny drones that target specific pests. That is likely to be one topic of the science fiction masterpiece series I plan to write as soon as I become unexpectedly independently wealthy and retire from my day job. Of course, in my science fiction book, they will probably start running amok and killing all the pollinators, which will of course threaten the world food supply. But then someone will invent a pollinator drone, which will seem like a good idea for awhile until in a desperate attempt to save the world’s remaining natural ecosystems, we seed them with these various drones and they, well, run amok somehow. Aren’t most science fiction stories about something or other running amok?
And in one more robot story, there was an autonomous quadcopter unveiled at CES (you’re supposed to just know what that stands for) that can supposedly carry human occupants, although nobody has been brave enough to ride in it.
Ehang, the drone maker, claims its all-electric quadcopter, the Ehang 184, is the first in the world that is capable of operating autonomously. According to the company’s announcement, the vehicle is like an oversized drone – built just big enough to carry a single passenger. That passenger supposedly has only to plug in their desired destination, sit back, and enjoy the ride while the aircraft takes off and climbs up to 11,000 feet. If there is a problem, Ehang says the human passenger can take over the controls and pilot the chopper to safety…
Despite the skepticism, Ehang officials believe their autonomous quadcopter could revolutionize personal travel on a global scale. “It’s been a lifetime goal of mine to make flight faster, easier, and more convenient than ever. The 184 provides a viable solution to the many challenges the transportation industry faces in a safe and energy-efficient way,” said Ehang CEO Huazhi Hu. “I truly believe that Ehang will make a global impact across dozens of industries beyond personal travel. The 184 is evocative of a future we’ve always dreamed of and is primed to alter the very fundamentals of the way we get around.”
There are obvious military uses – no needles attached to these but I don’t see why there couldn’t be. It might seem dangerous to drive these things around town. But one more thought I have is that if we replaced our rubber-wheeled cars with something like this, it could obviate the need for so much pavement even if it were just elevated a few inches or feet off the ground. Maybe they could be soft and just bounce off each other at low speed without damage. Maybe they could stack or hang on hooks rather than needing horizontal parking lots. Maybe we could get rid of a lot of pollution and flooding caused by all that pavement, plus a lot of the toxins that come from tire and brake dust. It might take more energy though to both elevate these vehicles and propel them around than we use on cars now, I am not sure about that. A clean cheap energy source would always be a good idea.
With all the talk of self-driving cars, I figured self-driving trucks and buses wouldn’t be far behind. And here is a self-driving truck, already licensed in a few U.S. states. It sounds like there is still a human driver in it for now. But in the long term, I imagine this is bad news for human driver as an occupation. It should be good news for the safety of humans on the road in general. It seems like it could favor the economics of road freight vs. rail. Then again, it might make much narrower travel lanes practical, leaving plenty of room in the right of way for other infrastructure like high speed rail, high voltage lines, pipelines, etc. Time will tell.
Is widespread commercialization of self-driving cars decades out? No, 2-5 years according to Google!
Google has made no secret of its ambitions to revolutionize transportation with autonomous vehicles. Chief Executive Officer Larry Page is said to be personally fascinated by the challenge of making cities operate more efficiently. The company recently said the driverless car technology in development within its Google X research lab is from two to five years from being ready for widespread use. At the Detroit auto show last month, Chris Urmson, the Google executive in charge of the project, articulated one possible scenario in which autonomous vehicles are patrolling neighborhoods to pick up and drop off passengers. “We’re thinking a lot about how in the long-term, this might become useful in people’s lives, and there are a lot of ways we can imagine this going,” Urmson said in a conference call with reporters on Jan. 14. “One is in the direction of the shared vehicle. The technology would be such that you can call up the vehicle and tell it where to go and then have it take you there…”
Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has publicly discussed what he sees as the inevitability of autonomous taxis, saying they could offer cheaper rides and a true alternative to vehicle ownership. “The Uber experience is expensive because it’s not just the car but the other dude in the car,” he said at a technology conference in 2014, referring to the expense of paying human drivers. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost [of taking an Uber] gets cheaper than owning a vehicle.”
One group of players you never hear mentioned in these articles…the Detroit car companies. Remember, they would have gone extinct in the 2007-8 financial crisis if the government hadn’t bailed them out. Are they completely missing out on the autonomous vehicle and ride-sharing trends now, instead picturing the millennials and their children living in the exurbs with two cars in every garage? If so, they may be headed for short-term extinction. I’m also waiting to hear more about autonomous trucks and buses – they have to be coming.
