Drive Me, Crazy

Drunk as a skunk and about to climb into your car with little more than an ability to turn the vehicle on and push a button or two. In 2014, you’d risk a major DUI (DWI in some states) arrest and conviction. But will that be true in 2025? We’ve all read about the notion of “driverless” cars, vehicles controlled though a complex combination of some form of tracking (GPS or sensors embedded in the roadways), inter-vehicle communications and built-in collision-avoidance safety mechanisms.

As new cars come on the road with increasingly sophisticated navigation systems (often linked to traffic monitoring providers), auto-parking, back-up sensors and cameras (soon to be mandated on all new cars sold in the United States) and optional forward-sensing automatic braking systems (including so-called adaptive cruise control) that stop vehicles often faster than even an alert driver can react, the path to driverless cars become clear.

We see the ads for many of these new technologies all the time. When you are stuck in traffic and moving slightly faster than a speeding snail, looking all the other cars idling but sucking up gasoline like a starving baby at its mother’s breast, you have probably said to yourself, “there has to be a better way.”

As gasoline prices soar (and make you sore), as the linkage between burning fossil fuels and global warming becomes as clear as the nose on your face, the notion of increasing automotive efficiency has to move beyond better and cleaner engines to eliminating the massive waste of fuel from traffic-impaired cars struggling through ever-worsening congestion. We are moving into a world where drivers will simply not be allowed to drive their cars, at least on heavily congested highways.

But Americans love their cars, love the fun and power of driving. “You can’t take that away from us! It’s un-American!” Fact is, commuting to work is getting horribly onerous, and commute times are getting worse every year, particularly as the government is failing to upgrade and expand our infrastructure under the stupid mantra of “budget deficit control.” What’s more, in a recent J.D. Power survey, 37 percent of Americans said they were interested in self-driving cars. That’s a long way since Google pioneered the concept of the driverless car just a few years ago.” Washington Post, April 24th. Imagine a car that even finds its own parking space, for example!

As most traffic pattern technologists will tell you, the algorithms required to understand and analyze traffic congestion are among the most complex mathematical problems on earth. A car three miles down the road, changing lanes badly, can have a ripple effect during rush hour, disproportionate to the event itself. How the driver who is cut off reacts, and how other drivers react down the line, can exacerbate already-horrific congestions with exponential impact and speed. The aggregation of “little things” from too many cars on the road becomes a set of complex mathematics that even super-computers have difficulty analyzing.

The conclusion for most who have studied the subject is that the only way to manage these traffic systems is to remove the variable that causes most of the problems: human beings making bad traffic decisions… which pretty much means eliminating human beings from making any decisions. If all vehicles were equipped today with the necessary driverless technology, the implementation of automated traffic control would be a slam dunk.

It’s clear that as the vision of the future clarifies among traffic planners over the years, we are going to see increasing federal mandates for various forms of implementation technology that at least has cars able to sense other cars, perhaps share communications with them and perhaps later have steering and braking systems that can be transferred to a computer-controlled system.

Most major carmakers are already experimenting with these concepts. “[Y]ou can already see how some very sober-minded thinking about a very way-out-there technology is starting to filter down into the mainstream. The types of self-driving features found in luxury cars — the Audis and BMWs of the world — will likely make their way into cheaper, mid-market vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now talking about making vehicle-to-vehicle communication a mandatory requirement within the near future, potentially paving the way for a network of ‘connected cars’ trading data and information about everything from traffic conditions to the availability of parking spaces. In addition to California and Nevada testing out the self-driving car (both states with a lot of highways), you now have a crowded metropolitan area like Washington, D.C. also gearing up for the arrival of the driverless car.” Washington Post.

And even if you take the vast reduction in gasoline waste out of the equation, the cost savings from an automated traffic system is still significant. “A recent Eno Center for Transportation study analyzing the impact of driverless cars concluded that, within central business districts, every new autonomously-driving vehicle replacing one of today’s cars would result in approximate cost savings of $250 per year. Those cost savings result from a combination of lower land, construction, maintenance and operational costs. Those are very real cost savings, and don’t even include the amount of gas that is saved or the amount of traffic congestion that would be reduced by cars not circling around, looking for parking.” Washington Post.

But practical questions remain. How do you blend older, technologically impaired cars with driverless vehicles? Even with specialized HOV-like lanes, moving driverless cars to those lanes is a challenge. The issues abound, even though we all know we are heading in this direction: “Of course, we’re a long way from any concept of a self-driving car — a decade, even more. Even the most conservative estimates project 2020 as the first year that driverless cars will start to appear in the mainstream. And there are a lot of regulatory obstacles to overcome. Read just about any study about the future of the driverless car, and there are pages and pages dedicated to hard, tough issues such as ethics, privacy, security and liability. The questions keep on coming: If a one self-driving car hits another self-driving car while backing into a parking space, who’s responsible?” Washington Post. Will there come a day when we don’t even own cars, just call a vehicle up like an automated taxi service?

I’m Peter Dekom, and what do you think the future of cars will look like?