Cars, Trucks, the Future, Driverless and the Occasional Now

Back in March, CBS’ 60 Minutes did a piece on driverless trucks: “Few are aware that driverless 18-wheelers are already on the road. The test runs on highways have humans in them just in case sensors or computers fail, but an autonomous trucking executive says by next year, they won't. The future of freight on America's roads can be a driverless one, this executive says. And that's news to many, especially the truck drivers who stand to lose their livelihoods…

“‘We believe we'll be able to do our first driver-out demonstration runs on public highways in 2021,’ says Chuck Price, chief product officer at TuSimple, an autonomous trucking firm with operations in the U.S. and China. With a proving ground in Arizona, TuSimple is one of several firms hoping to make billions in an industry that moves over 70% of the nation's goods

“Sensors, cameras and radar devices affixed to the rig feed data to the artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer that controls the truck. Price says his product is superior to others. ‘Our system can see farther than any other autonomous system in the world. We can see forward over a half-mile… day, night and in the rain. And in the rain at night,’ he says.” CBS, 60 Minutes Overtime, March 13th. Deployment? That’s 2021 for those who care! There are a few issues that are still being ironed out, challenges like dealing “with construction zones and median crossovers that direct traffic to what the robot would typically think is the wrong side of the road.” Trucks.com, October 13th. All solvable. Still, testing requires someone sitting in the driver’s seat.

But having someone in the driver’s seat as a back-up isn’t always reassuring. Returning from the Pacific Northwest over the last Christmas holiday, we passed a Tesla sedan with the seats in full recline, driver fast asleep. Apparently, that reality is not uncommon. “Police in Canada have charged a man with speeding and dangerous driving after he was found asleep at the wheel of his self-driving car as it travelled at 150km/h [93 mph] down a highway in the province of Alberta.

“Announcing the charges…, the Royal Canadian Mounted police said that on 9 July they received a complaint that a Model S Tesla vehicle was speeding on the highway near the town of Ponoka… ‘The car appeared to be self-driving, traveling over 140km/h [87 mph], with both front seats completely reclined and both occupants appearing to be asleep,’ the RCMP said in a statement… After the police flashed their lights, however, the Tesla electric vehicle reportedly sped up to ‘exactly’ 150km/h, according to police. The speed limit on most of Canada’s highway network is 110km/h.

”The driver, a 20-year-old man from neighboring British Columbia, was charged with speeding and given a 24-hour license suspension for driving while fatigued… The province has also decided to charge the driver with dangerous driving, and he is due to appear in court in December.

“The proliferation of self-driving vehicles, pioneered by the electric car company Tesla, has posed a challenge for regulators trying to determine the safety and effectiveness of the on-board systems… In January, an Ontario driver was charged with reckless driving after officers spotted him using both hands to floss his teeth as his vehicle sped along the highway at 135 km/h [83 mph].” The Guardian (UK), September. There have been a few accidents where Tesla’s autonomous driving system well… failed. 

Tesla’s Elon Musk, now purportedly the world’s fourth richest person, is focusing on what many see as a bigger problem than driverless command and control: range for totally electric vehicles. Many think Tesla is a wildly over-valued company; there are also doubters who see Tesla coming up against some real competition and making promises about new battery capacity that just might not be as close to broad commercialization as the company suggests.  Susan Karlin, writing for the September 20th FastCompany.com, assesses Tesla’s challenges:

“CEO Elon Musk is expected to unveil breakthrough battery technology and automotive architecture, including a longer-lasting ‘million-mile’ battery that could drop electric vehicle (EV) prices to those of gasoline cars and contribute to the electric grid. And then there’s the question of whether Musk will stand by earlier promises to deliver Level 5, fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) this year, especially in the wake of a Consumer Reports review this month that found Tesla’s current self-driving capabilities falling short.

“But will Tesla be able to deliver on those promises, from game-changing batteries to true AVs in 2020? The rumors that swirl around the company, its erratic founder, and inflated valuation cloud a more complicated truth. To achieve its goals, Tesla will have to pull together an assemblage of research, data collection, and acquired technologies to enable a battery that could revolutionize EVs, as well as beat out a host of self-driving competitors that are in many ways closer to achieving driverless vehicles than Tesla.

“Already producing the world’s leading EV, Tesla has also become the most valuable auto company in the world, despite selling millions fewer cars than traditional car manufacturers. It’s the first automaker to sell more than 1 million EVs, with its bestselling Model 3 topping 500,000 units. Tesla stock—which was going for $2213 a share before its 5:1 split on August 31—has enjoyed a 414% price increase this year, with a market cap of $412 billion, a figure that many analysts and even Musk himself deem overvalued. The stock’s performance has polarized analysts and investors on whether to value Tesla as a car or technology company.”

Whatever else is said or done, we are inevitably heading into a universe of accelerating automotive change. Our highways and bridges – without even looking at our power grid, dams and levees – are about two trillion dollars or more short of what is needed to fix and upgrade for current demand levels. One tiny little catch: Congress, already slammed from deficits from COVID stimulus costs and the world’s most ill-conceived mega corporate tax cut, is exceptionally unlikely to appropriate the necessary funds to fix this anomaly anytime soon. Driverless vehicles at least offer us the ability to use what we have more efficiently, stretching our ability to use existing infrastructure for a longer time. Not that much longer, I might add.  And that’s just part of a bigger reality.

Lots of jobs will be lost, an impact from artificial intelligence that will continue to decimate a spectrum of human skills well beyond the blue-collar workers already affected. Doctors, lawyers, financial planners and analysts and clerical jobs are going to be hit hard too. Hardly just truck drivers. While we need adequately paid labor to fund our 70%-plus consumer economy, this massive shift to autonomous worker-replacement stands to redefine our political, social and economic assumptions and underlying systems… just when the COVID recovery will most desperately need jobs for all those individuals whose employers faded from the plague.

    I’m Peter Dekom, and as rough a ride as the current combination of a pandemic plus political polarization is causing, hang on to your seats, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!