The Case for Autonomous Cars

Many people are upset at the prospect of cars without steering wheels emerging as the new norm, cutting the human driver out of the formula. First, let’s pause to remember human drivers cause 6 million accidents per year and 90 deaths per day in the US alone, so we’re not that hot at driving which requires a lot of complex processing, pushing us to the biological limits. And for every death there are thousands of injuries, comas, long recoveries, lawsuits, insurance haggling, bodyshop repairs and more that add misery to our lives. So I’m not one of those who is upset at these changes other than that they can’t come soon enough.

Machines Stay on Task

Humans are easily distracted — music, texts, radio, conversations, even a thought can take us off task. Machines will never be distracted. Even the most focused person has been proven truly unable to multi-task, even when they think they are. Any number of things can flood our brains with thoughts, memories, associations and before you know it we’ve forgotten about the other thing we were doing—driving. Add to this the modern reality of the ever-present mobile device and our attention becomes completely divided. Driving in any sort of nominal urban or suburban environment requires utmost attention. Things can happen in the blink of an eye so it’s no surprise we’ve seen a major uptick in serious accidents involving texting or honestly, even fooling with or staring at a map you are using to guide you to your destination, taking your eyes and mind off the road.

On the other hand, a computer can readily multitask by design, taking in many millions of bits of sensory data every second and turning them into actionable decisions on where to go, how fast and where not to go. They can do this for hours at a time with no degradation because they don’t sleep and don’t get bored repeating the same thing incessantly. They just do it.

We only have two eyes on the front of our head. Cars have 8 cameras all around, lidar and radar and can see in the dark.

Since machines have no ego and speed of light digital communications, they can communicate with each other without any personal agenda and can follow the same rules and algorithms in tandem coordination on a network, maximizing safety, efficiency and traffic flow.

The Task of Driving

Simply put, cars get us from Point A to Point B. That’s our primary goal. Driving is faster than walking, usually because we have something to do at Point B that we can’t get done at Point A and Point B is too far to walk conveniently. But to achieve this simple goal, we are forced into thousands of subtasks along the way as we drive: Watch the road, watch the other drivers, read the signs, obey the signs, remember the rules, check our GPS, put on our turn signals, take the shortcut or detour, react to random things, don’t overreact, adjust our speed, hit the brakes, avoid the obstacles, make the turns, follow the curves, negotiate the 4-way stops, decide what to do on yellow light, find a parking spot, park and do it all again later. We do much of this unconsciously but we always have our inner brain with an even larger mission—don’t die and don’t kill anyone. That’s a lot to do and worry about for a simple little trip between A and B.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone or something else could take care of these tasks while we still achieved our Point B goal? All of these things are well within the scope of what AI with Machine Learning and Controls can do. Frankly, with few exceptions we are not far from a time where machines can do these thing far better than us. Tesla is training their driving model 24 hours a day with real-world data streaming from their fleets of cars and all their sensors, learning from our mistakes and successes and “making the connections” between the inputs from all the sensors to the actions of the drivers. This will only improve and never get worse because models only become more accurate over time, not less so.

Humans Are Inconsitent

Humans come with all different reflexes, skills, experience, memory and judgement levels. Machines will only have more and more experience, more precise control and keep getting better over time and will generally all inherit the same skills.

Cars are machines. We are not and we didn’t evolve to process things at 75 MPH or even 25 MPH. Things happen too fast. Driving is an unnatural act that puts us in more danger than we are generally aware of because of all the things that can go wrong.

Most accidents are caused by driver errors such as: distraction, overreaction, poor judgement, speeding, chance taking, blind spots, equipment failures, inebriation, confusion, emotional issues, rubbernecking and more. Machines will be free of most of these factors.

Time Recovery

The average person will spend 3.5 years of their lives driving (18 days per year × 75). Imagine turning that time into something more productive and enjoyable. Cars waste our time delivering us from point A to B. We are required to focus only on driving when that time could be spent looking around, reading or whatever we like, including being inebriated or too tired or too old (or young) to drive. In fact, for some, it will be billable time because essentially the car can act as a moveable office and so office work days can be shortened because commuting won’t be unproductive, if desired.

Self-driving cars will give people more time together with family and friends which will start to rebuild social fabric which has been frayed as we’ve become more digital. Many commutes are also quite stressful so to reduce this will add greatly to our health and longevity as stress is a known killer.

Cars will be faster and traffic jams will be a thing of the past because of the advanced algorithms involved keeping cars coordinated and intersections moving smoothly.

Since Self-driving cars will never tire, one could sleep comfortably and arrive to the destination overnight like in a sleeper train or plane. Vans could even have mini-bathrooms if desired and the inside of cars could be designed for hanging out more like a limousine. It’s pretty much like having a personal chauffeur at your beck and call.

Personal Chauffeur

No matter how much you love driving, you don’t love all driving and most of us are quite content when someone else gets to run that errand or they get to drive while you are passenger. In it’s fanciest form, having a full-time professional driver take care of all that “messy driving stuff” while you chill out or make phone calls in the back has heretofore been reserved for the wealthy and the movers and shakers with no time to spare for stressful driving. Movies have been dedicated to this somewhat revered role of the chauffeur.

I have no trouble with the idea that everybody deserves a chauffeur as much as the well-to-do. There are many things in history that were once in the purview of the wealthy or even royalty that through technological advances made their way into the ranks of the Hoi Polloi such as running hot and cold water, refrigerators and AC’s, cell phones, electric windows on cars and thousand more. In fact the modern person enjoys things Kings and Queens of Yore couldn’t even imagine, let alone afford or have. Autonomous cars will merely be another one of these equalizers to come along.

But fear not, über wealthy, your auto interior can still be decked out with fancier jewel-encrusted details and exotic woods and a bar with expensive aged scotches and fine wines, until these too become commonplace through nanotechnology and automation.

The Green Factor

Autonomous cars will tend to be greener, electric vehicles so asthma levels will drop way down, cities will be quiet and carbon will be greatly reduced. This will eventually include 15.5 million trucks which are spewing dirty diesel exhaust and are a major contributor to particulate pollution. Indeed, gone will be the need to park idling in a rest area (to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer) so the environmental benefits are far-reaching.

Electric Energy Production is centralized and will only improve sustainability over time, becoming carbon neutral or better. Even roadways and parking lots can be turned into giant solar collectors instead of dead, nature-killing pavement. So even if today’s energy is via petroleum/gas/coal we can see it switching to renewable solar/wind/fusion at a breakneck pace, especially as Energy Storage tech improves.

Electric cars won’t require gasoline and oil and filthy oil changes and all the toxicities of petroleum refining, delivery, dumping, evaporation, methane releases and more. No more coolants, hoses or other things superior electromagnetic propulsion doesn’t require.

Electric cars don’t use energy when idling and can even recover energy in the braking process, adding to their green appeal and efficiency.

Goodbye Traffic Stops, Chases, Lights and More

We’ve all witnessed the horrors of traffic stops gone awry, usually at the expense of communities of color. There is currently a lot of discussion around whether or not cops should even be in the business of making such stops and it usually involves more cameras and automated ticketing systems which is also less than desirable. The nice thing about an autonomous vehicle is it has all the laws baked in and the driver isn’t trying to rush a yellow light or worse, blast through a red light. In a modern smart grid, these cars won’t even really need traffic lights (except where pedestrians or bikes are crossing) because they will already be programmed to smartly negotiate intersections and be aware of pedestrians. Many signs, lights and wires clutter up our world in order to keep human driver informed but robotic drivers don’t need those, they can have all that information baked in. This will also free police up for more important things and save tons of money on running courts, lawsuits and all the related issues. If a smart car were used in a serious crime, police could also have an option to remotely disable the car and make it pull over and lock the doors so it is a win for safer society. Also, since many of these cars will be owned by the company that provides the subscription, they will take care of the insurance, tickets and fines, if any, and maintenance as mentioned below.

Money and Space Saved

Car insurance will be a thing of the past and will be the responsibility of the car service. Cars will less and less be privately owned and will be available on-demand as a subscription service where costs are amortized and shared, similar to utilities and Internet now. After all, to a computer, delivering people from point A to B is sort of similar in concept to delivering an email from one server to another or a “packet of information.”

Electric vehicles will be much easier to repair and maintain and can be modular so components can be quickly swapped in and out. Even charging could be a process of swapping in a pre-charged universal energy pack making it as easy as driving over a device that performed the swap automatically.

Parking will no longer be required as cars will respond on demand and can park themselves out of town if needed or drive themselves for repairs. This will free up cities to be more human friendly with wider sidewalks and much less space dedicated to parking.

Taking into account the costs of car loans, interest rates, insurance, gas, oil, coolants, maintenance, parking and more, the savings could be enormous.

Classic Cars

Many of us simply love driving, especially on a nice windy road on a beautiful day so we would need to allow for this, especially during a long transition to autonomous driving. It is likely the roles would be reversed from today where instead the gasoline stations would be fewer and farther between as electric charging became the ubiquitous norm. Gas would become much more expensive as demand dropped and production dwindled.

Certain roads would need to be deemed either human drivers only or mixed roads but it would not be long before certain key roads were off limits to human drivers who would not be able to coordinate on a machine level and would be too slow to keep up with the AI-governed machines operating at monumental computational sensory speeds.

Pitfalls and Hurdles

The path to fully automated driving will not be completely smooth. Computers will make mistakes because of the sheer number of things that can go wrong while driving. In the beginning it will be very likely that erratic human drivers and pedestrians will cause most of the accidents with autonomous vehicles but as they learn more and improve these incidents will also be reduced below human-only levels.

Some people are concerned that electric cars can be hacked and hijacked for nefarious purposes. There are however, virtually unbreakable encryption techniques emerging that will make this highly unlikely.

As we all know, computers break down all the time. This factor will be handled using multiple safety systems that include full redundancy reducing the odds to below the odds of a regular, gas-powered car breaking down.

It seems likely that the car manufacturers themselves will be enticed into the subscription services, possibly even cutting out the fleet services and common sharing services of today such as Lyft and Uber. There will be no more need for dealerships and cars will simply be distributed to areas where they can immediately begin shared service which will be disruptive to existing businesses that rely on cars. They may even be tempted to create their own cars to stay in business but that’s no easy task. More likely they will be purchased by the GM’s, Toyota’s and Ford’s of the world.

Of course, one of the largest hurdles is that of employment where nearly one sixth of our present economy is dedicated to transportation of some sort in the form of drivers, truckers, cabbies, engineers, pilots and more. These folks would eventually need to find new occupations which has happened many times over the centuries as disruptive technologies emerged. First came the horseless carriage, then came the driverless car!

Conclusion

Electric, autonomous cars WILL come into normal usage sooner than later as they become safer than human-driven cars, greener, less expensive and with all the benefits listed above including: giving us back our time, improving social bonds, increasing mobility for seniors and underaged, saving many great lives, cost less, reducing police involvement with cars, unburdening municipal courts, improving our air and city life, reducing clutter, and much more. As far as I’m concerned it can’t come soon enough!