Insuring Autonomous Vehicle Owners

A common objection (or at least concern) regarding self-driving cars is the issue of liability. If my self-driving car hits another car, or person, who pays?

This seems to me like any easy problem to solve — it’s just a finance question — as opposed to the actual technology, which is a math and software and robotics question.

Presumably, for enough money, somebody will take on liability.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting idea through which to work.

An obvious analogy is to commercial airplanes, and in that case the passenger bears no responsibility. Although I’m not knowledgeable of this field, I would imagine liability is shared between the airline, the airplane manufacturer, and the pilots, although all of these groups probably have some form of insurance or re-insurance.

This might even be a near-perfect analogy, if self-driving cars usher in an Uber-centric future in which individuals subscribe to car services, rather than own individual cars.

In a future more like the current world, though, in which individuals own cars, it’s a little less clear who will accept liability.

Volvo and other manufacturers have pre-emptively claimed liability, but since they aren’t actually selling autonomous vehicles yet, it remains to be seen how that will stand up in practice.

My guess is that, at least for a while, drivers will need to maintain personal auto insurance, if only because cars will continue to have manual override features. But I suspect auto manufacturers will be quick to take on as much liability as they can, if only to protect their brands and sell more cars.

This could lead to something of a boom in personal injury law, as lawyers develop more appetite to finance cases against defendants (car companies) with deep pockets, and juries feel less guilty delivering big damages awards against giant corporations. And, that, in turn will be a boon for the insurance industry.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 19, 2015.

Autopilot Update

Last night, Tesla rolled out a software update to its Model S sedans. The update enables autopilot functionality on highways, as well as auto-parking in some situations.

This is a great step forward for Tesla, and a long-term step forward for consumers, as the new data will give Tesla a huge leg up in race for self-driving cars. Nothing like tens of thousands of users to work out the bugs in your software.

In the short-term, I think it’s probably only a small win for consumers. Tesla has been vocal that any accidents caused by the software will be the responsibility of the driver. This means drivers will have to stay engaged throughout the trip, scaling back a lot of the benefits to a self-driving car.

But, as Tesla gets more and more data and becomes more and more confident in its software, I imagine the day that Tesla takes responsibility for its autopilot is coming fast.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 15, 2015.

Companies Working on Self-Driving Cars

TechRadar has a pretty good slideshow, outlining the major players in the self-driving car space:

Google
Uber
Tesla
Honda
Mercedes-Benz
BMW
Audi
Delphi
Apple

They make the interesting point that Uber is the most secretive of these companies, at least as far as its self-driving car technology. Although there was a very public uproar when they partnered with, then hired away, Carnegie Mellon’s team, very little actual technology news has come out of the company. That doesn’t mean they’re not advancing fast, of course.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 14, 2015.

Hybrid Search

One of the revelations from CS373: Artificial Intelligence for Robotics, is the extent to which autonomous driving technology uses a hybrid of global mapping and local sensing.

So, for example, when if a car wants to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, it basically outsources the mapping functions to Google Maps, and only uses local computation for visual horizon driving.

This simplifies the software and allows the robotics wizards to focus just on local issues.

It’s one of those things that’s obvious once it’s explained but kind of revelatory.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 13, 2015.

Autonomous Driving Ethics

Chris Gerdes is a Stanford engineering professor working on driverless race cars. I imagine he’s doing some pretty neat technological work, but he’s made the press recently for a more philosophical reason — the ethics of driverless cars.

Bloomberg doesn’t do a terrific job raising the different ethical issues that might arise for a robot driver, but it gets the ball rolling and it’s not hard to imagine from there:

Take that double-yellow line problem. It is clear that the car should cross it to avoid the road crew. Less clear is how to go about programming a machine to break the law or to make still more complex ethical calls.

One potential dilemma, for example, is how to program for the famous trolley problem. If a computer has to make a decision between staying on course and killing 5 people, or veering off the road and killing one pedestrian, what do we program the computer to do?

What if it’s a 25% chance of killing 5 people against the certainty of killing one person?

These are pretty extreme examples, but even the more mundane decisions aren’t entirely clear. Should driver-less cars adhere rigidly to the speed limit? 5 m.p.h. in parking garages?

What if another driver motions at the car to proceed out of order through a stop sign?

What about a late merge that requires crossing a solid white line?

I don’t expect these would be insurmountable issues, but they will make explicit the extent to which we implicitly assume the violation of our traffic laws.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 12, 2015.

How Many Companies Are Developing Self-Driving Cars?

In an article about self-driving car accidents, Engadget, makes an interesting side observation:

However, there are no less than ten companies testing self-driving vehicles in the state, and Apple is at least considering entering the fray.

So which companies are testing self-driving cars?

Here is the California DMV list:

Volkswagen Group of America
Mercedes Benz
Google
Delphi Automotive
Tesla Motors
Bosch
Nissan
Cruise Automation
BMW
Honda

That comes out to 5 traditional automakers, plus Tesla, plus two auto-part suppliers, plus Google, plus one start-up.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 9, 2015.

Where to Ride an Autonomous Vehicle

Tech Insider lists five places:

Between two towns in the Netherlands
A bus in China
Taxis in Japan
Around an office park in California
Somewhere in Finland

Of these, the taxis in Japan seem by far the most interesting, from a rider’s point of voice. The engineering involved in all five of them is spectacular of course.

But the benefits of self-driving cars will only really arrive when they move beyond being “monorails on wheels” and they become personal vehicles to go wherever we want.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 8, 2015.

Ask for Forgiveness: Autonomous Vehicle Addition

Uber is famously succeeding with the ask-for-forgivness-not-permission approach.

A lot of automakers may wind up borrowing that page from the Uber.

Volvo just put out a call for the US to regulate self-driving cars:

Swedish automotive group Volvo Cars Wednesday urged U.S. federal authorities to impose nationwide guidelines for self-driving cars, vowing to accept full liability should one if its cars be involved in an accident while in autonomous mode.

Elon Musk has also voiced concern over the lack of regulation:

Musk, who spoke Tuesday at the Automotive News World Congress conference, said he expects the lack of clear federal regulations covering self-driving cars could delay their introduction until 2022 or 2023.

These are smart guys, and I’m sure they’re aware of Uber’s success vis a vis regulators.

To at least some extent, presumably they are angling for regulations that will reduce their own liability or box competitors out of the market.

But, if companies can get driver-less cars into the hands of consumers before the regulations clamp down, then those consumers will wind up powering the driver-less car lobby.

To take just one example, a key market segment for driver-less cars will be the elderly. And the elderly vote. A lot.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 7, 2015.

The Sell

The Guardian recently ran a piece entitled, “Self-driving cars: safe, reliable — but a challenging sell for Google“:

The strongest case for self-driving cars is safety, its logical, programmed movement also means vehicles can be centrally controlled, rerouting traffic away from congestion. Since the project started in 2009, Google has driven most of its 1.2m hours of tests in a small fleet of customised Lexus autonomous cars. As of July this year, there had been 14 accidents but all had been caused by human error, not by the software. Around 33,000 people die in traffic accidents in the US every year; Google says self-driving cars will reduce that number significantly. The opportunities are, indisputably, immense.

The hard sell for Google will be winning over generations of people who feel safer being in control of their vehicle, don’t know or care enough about the technology, or who simply enjoy driving. Yet most people who try a demo say the same thing: how quickly the self-driving car feels normal, and safe. As the head of public policy quipped, “perhaps we just need to do demos for 7 billion people”. Google’s systems engineer Jaime Waydo helped put self-driving cars on Mars while she worked at Nasa; it may well be that regulation and public policy prove easier there than on Earth.

I think the article gets the sale wrong. While safety may be important for regulators, I am doubtful that it will be an important sell for consumers, at least initially.

Early adopters tend to be people who have an overwhelming interest in technology, or a strong need for the product to solve a specific pain point. Safety is rarely a pain point until it’s too late.

I think the strongest case for self-driving cars will be helping people who place a lot of value on mobility but either cannot drive or place a high negative value on the act of driving. That will be caregivers, companies that don’t want to pay drivers, and commuters.

And that’s a pretty huge market.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 6, 2015.

Ride-Sharing and Self-Driving Cars

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been vocal about the company’s desire to move away from human drivers and toward self-driving cars, as soon as possible.

That day is still in the future, though, and for the moment, Uber is stuck in a globe-spanning collection of fights with taxi commissions and city governments. Uber has mostly been able to win these fights.

But presumably the advent of self-driving cars will lead to round two of these regulatory battles, and with the current Uber drivers standing in opposition to self-driving machines.

I hope and expect the forward march of progress to continue, but it is ironic that in order to prevail today, Uber is setting up a potential problem for tomorrow.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 5, 2015.