Self-driving cars reach a fork in the road, and automakers take different routes
Self-driving cars reach a fork in the road, and
automakers take different routes
By Ashley Halsey III and Michael Laris August 24 at 5:43
PM
Cars capable of driving themselves may be on the showroom
floor sooner than you think, but whether they should come with all the current
essentials — including a steering wheel and pedals on the floor — has the auto
industry at a fork in the road.
Ford sided with the pioneering engineers at Google last
week in announcing plans to introduce limited-use vehicles without traditional
controls within five years. Some other major automakers — and virtually all of
them are well along in their work on self-driving vehicles — say they will
introduce automated elements one step at a time, until drivers accept that they
no longer need to control their cars.
The different approaches are rooted in conflicting views
of safety and what the public is willing to accept.
“It’s almost like asking people before they even really
knew what an iPhone was, how the iPhone might change their lives,” said Johanna
Zmud, senior research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Tesla, which has been aggressive in rolling out limited
automated steering and similar features, made headlines worldwide this year
when one of its cars was involved in a fatal crash with a tractor-trailer.
Although the vehicle’s “autopilot” system was far from fully autonomous, and
the crash is still being investigated, the death of its driver seemed to
underscore worries about the transition to self-driving cars.
Tesla said “neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the
white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was
not applied.”
“This to me is the crux of the problem,” said Raj
Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has been on the leading
edge of autonomous-vehicle technology. “On one side, you have humans who become
too comfortable and stop paying attention. The other side of the equation is
that the technology for vehicles to drive themselves is just not mature
enough.”
Google decided on the no-wheel, no-pedals approach after
allowing its employees to drive the company’s test cars. Despite plenty of
warnings, the experiment did not go well.
“There was a brief period when people would be a little
nervous and monitor the car very carefully,” said Google engineer Nathaniel
Fairfield, “and then they would start to relax and they would sort of trust the
system, and really over-trust the system, and start to get distracted.”
After watching one driver rummage around in his back seat
in search of a phone-charging cord, Google engineers decided it was too risky
to create a system in which drivers would be expected to take control of the
car at a critical moment.
“If you’ve got an autonomous system that’s working almost
all the time, the only time when it doesn’t work is when something is really
ambiguous or confusing,” Fairfield said. “The worst thing in the world, almost,
is for someone to hear a klaxon go off, freak out, grab the steering wheel and
do something wrong.”
The dangers caused by drivers who become distracted or
fall asleep are well established. In 2014, 3,179 people were killed and 431,000
injured in distracted-driving crashes. That same year, the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration estimated that 7 percent of all crashes and
almost 17 percent of fatal crashes involved drowsy driving.
When it comes to self-driving cars, a Stanford University
study indicated that distraction “may make transitions to driver control more
difficult” and that “drivers may sleep for significant periods on long
journeys, increasing the difficulty of rousing them and having immediate
engagement.”
Rajkumar, who brought Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous SUV to
Capitol Hill two years ago for members of Congress to test-ride, said he is
more convinced than ever that introducing safe-driving features —
lane-departure warnings, cameras and sensors — gradually is the prudent path.
“We are able to drive only because we have common sense
when it comes to things we’ve never seen before,” he said. “But computer
software does not have that level of cognitive abilities to deal with things it
has never seen before.”
While Google is trying to go straight to a fully
autonomous vehicle, many companies that actually sell cars today are embracing
a more gradual transition.
Audi says it will sell “piloted driving” systems in some
models starting in 2018. And they will be more restrictive than Tesla’s
autopilot of today.
The 2018 Audi A8 will be able to operate hands-free, but
only on controlled-access highways and only until the car reaches 35 mph. This
would allow a driver to safely fumble around on an iPhone while behind the
wheel in a Capital Beltway traffic jam, company officials said. But it would
not allow the car to drive itself on the Florida highway with cross streets
where the Tesla was going 74 mph when it crashed.
“Our approach has always been step by step,” said Brad
Stertz, Audi’s director of government affairs. With the cars headed to market
soon, “we don’t think it’s wise to throw drivers into an environment they don’t
completely understand or trust. That just invites misuse.”
Initially, Audi envisions steering wheels as remaining
critical components in the cars it sells.
“I think the difference between what Google’s talking
about and what we’re talking about is, we believe the driver is still
responsible, just like an airline pilot is still responsible for an airliner on
autopilot,” Stertz said. “They’re still situationally aware. They’re still able
and responsive and capable of taking over if needed.”
To avoid the tuning-out phenomenon that so concerned
Google engineers and many others, the Audi will have “a driver-availability
system,” Stertz said, “that simply monitors, are their eyes open? Are they
occasionally looking up and out the front of the car, out the front windshield?
In other words, are they available to potentially take over?”
The “highway traffic jam pilot,” slated to be released in
2018, will be followed, in 2020 or 2021, by a full-speed highway pilot system,
which will also work only on controlled-access highways and when other
conditions are met, such as drivers’ wearing seat belts.
Audi is simultaneously developing fully automated
technology “that may not require driver controls” and could be used for a
variety of on-demand services, Stertz said, though the company has not put a
date on when such a car might be released.
It also remains unclear what will become of federal
regulations that currently require driver controls in vehicles.
“Ultimately, we’re all converging in the next decade into
a very similar location,” Stertz said of carmakers and tech companies such as
Google.
General Motors is trying to frame the challenges
differently. It says a driver will be provided with its driverless car. The
company invested $500 million in Uber’s smaller ride-hailing cousin, Lyft, and
sees that as a way to thread the tricky human and technical issues.
While a fully autonomous car is on the horizon, that’s
not GM’s goal out of the gate.
“Right now, we’re looking at what we call an on-demand,
autonomous ride-sharing network,” said Kevin Kelly, senior manager of advanced
technology communications. “There would still be a steering wheel and
acceleration and brake pedals, and there would be a safety driver or pilot in
the vehicle.”
Uber, meanwhile, announced last week that it will begin
ferrying customers around Pittsburgh by month’s end in self-driving vehicles
with a “chaperone” ready to take over when necessary. It hopes to remove costly
human drivers in the long run.
Kelly, commenting on GM’s similar approach, said, “We think
it’s probably the right solution for getting the customer familiar with the
technology.” Using the technology in such a context, he said, “would be more
comfortable for the consumers.”
But what does “comfortable” mean?
That’s a key question as automakers and other players
head down divergent paths. Are people ready to trust a car without a steering
wheel and pedals right off the bat? Or would they feel more comfortable being
eased along with a step-by-step approach?
In an online survey in April, researchers at the
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute presented 618 people,
in various age groups, with three visions: Completely self-driving, partially
self-driving and no self-driving.
Two-thirds of people reported being moderately or very
concerned about riding in a fully self-driving car. In answer to the question,
“Would you prefer that a completely self-driving vehicle still have a steering
wheel plus gas and brake pedals (or some other controls) to enable a driver to
take control if desired?” the results were overwhelming: 94.5 percent wanted a
wheel; 5.5 percent did not.
While 37 percent of those surveyed were “very concerned”
about being in a completely self-driving vehicle, 17 percent had that same
level of concern about riding in a partially self-driving one.
“We think it should be the opposite. . . . We feel that
people’s concern is misplaced,” said Brandon Schoettle, project manager for
sustainable worldwide transportation at the Michigan institute. “This is a bit
of a public relations issue for these companies as you move ahead.”
Given how little experience people have with autonomous
cars, Schoettle said it is understandable that they feel more secure being able
to jump back in and drive.
“They view it as a vehicle they can take control of when
they want,” Schoettle said. But he added, “There are major safety implications
of that transfer of control back and forth.”
Zmud, the Texas A&M scientist, did surveys and
interviews in Austin and found a 50-50 split between those who intended to use
driverless cars and those who did not.
“They are thinking about ‘the car I have now, but
sometimes it can drive itself,’ without thinking this will be a brand-new
vehicle and it will be very different,” she said.
The Michigan study indicated that drivers 45 and older
were significantly more likely to be very concerned about riding in a fully
self-driving car. Zmud, following up her Austin online survey with interviews,
found that regardless of age, people identified as “early adopters” were more
open.
Ford said its initial generation of cars without steering
wheels or pedals would be used by ride-hailing and package-delivery services in
cities where they could be “geo-fenced,” or restricted to operate in specific geographic
zones.
Asked whether the no-steering-wheel approach or a more
incremental one will win wider public acceptance, Zmud said: “I think it’s
really too early to tell. I think we’re probably going to see both things
happening at the same time.”
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