Society Shouldn’t Drive

Timothy B. Lee argues accident rates can be dramatically lowered through the introduction of autonomous automobiles.

Timothy B. Lee has a wonderfully in-depth and postive article about self-driving cars called “The Future of Driving, Part II: Life after driving” on ars technica. Here’s an excerpt on how driverless cars will cause fewer accidents.

In short, a car that drives as well as the best human drivers would save tens of thousands of lives in the United States and hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. And most likely, we’ll be able to do even better than that. Computers have much faster reaction times than humans do, and they will be “looking” in all directions simultaneously. Self-driving cars may be able to avoid many of the mistakes that even experienced human drivers make. They won’t have blind spots, they’ll have better sensors, and they will be able to react almost instantaneously to unexpected problems, giving them the ability to recover from dangerous situations that no human driver could have handled.

It’s really worth reading all the way through as he goes into great detail about how autonomous automobiles will affect human safety, reduce the cost of transportation, spur taxi service in the future, give back tens of billions of hours of our time to us, and transform the retail business.

In 2020 Humans Shouldn’t Drive

IBM has just completed a report entitle “Automotive 2020: Clarity beyond the chaos.” The report details the widespread changes the automotive industry is expected to go through during the next twelve years, and how automakers can position themselves for success. Along with the sophistication of the consumer and the need to reach for expertise outside the industry, the report also goes into the progress of the intelligent vehicle:

The vehicle of 2020 will be a communications wonder. As another node on the Internet, it will connect with other vehicles (V2V connectivity), the transportation infrastructure (V2I) and to homes, businesses and other sources (V2x).

Road detection, self-repair, speech recognition, traffic regulation, age-focused assistance, autonomous parking, route optimization and more are explored as the researchers focus on safety, driver assistance, and service. They estimate that by 2020 all vehicles will have some level of connectivity, however the rate of progress depends a lot on the adoption of industry-wide standards. They ultimately predict that although we will not see a fully autonomous vehicle by 2020, we will be well on our way to achieving that vision.

Tom Vanderbilt Shouldn’t Drive

Wired has an interesting article up titled “Tom Vanderbilt’s Why We Drive the Way We Do Unlocks How to Unclog Traffic”. In it, Tom talks about what made him decide to write Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). The article talks about some of the fundamental problems with auto traffic, including people making decisions for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the system as a whole:

A typical puzzle: Waiting for an on-ramp metering light — a mild and remarkably effective congestion-control measure — has been proven to rankle drivers more than merging directly into a traffic jam. “What bothers people is that they can see traffic flowing smoothly,” Vanderbilt says. “So they think, ‘Why should I wait?’ They tend not to accept that the traffic is flowing smoothly precisely because of the metering light.”

The article eventually comes to the conclusion that a highly networked system in which cars behaved similar to packets of information flowing along the information superhighway would be optimal, however people would never stand for it. The lesson? Until people are willing to give up the steering wheel, expect to see congestion continue.

Concerned People Shouldn’t Drive

According to the Wired.com article “People Love Hybrids Enough to Actually Pay for Them”, as gas prises rise people are becoming more willing to invest in hybrid cars, even if it will cost them an extra $5,000 over a solely gas-powered counterpart. Unfortunately, they are a lot less willing to pay extra for collision-mitigation systems. According to Mike Marshall, director of automotive emerging technology at J.D. Power:

“As soon as the vehicle starts doing something for you with respect to the driver,” Marshall says, “that’s when there’s a lot of concern among respondents.”

With plenty of driver-assisting technology currently being created by automakers, how can they best assure concerned drivers of the safety in handing over the reins to the car itself?