Even if non-autonomous cars eventually get banned from the roads, there will probably always be some manned vehicles. Bicycles come to mind. And even just pedestrians. What will sharing the road look like when self-driving cars are the norm?
This, I think, has a much happier answer than the long and slow process of moving human-driven cars off the road.
The answer again is that self-driving cars will have to operate in the world as it exists today, but self-driving cars will make the world so much safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
The number worldwide is presumably much higher, as I imagine biking is less popular in the US than in many other countries, due to our relatively sparse population density.
Self-driving cars which will literally carry lots of sensors, and figuratively carry lots of liability (assuming they are run by corporations, not individuals), will be much better at avoiding pedestrian deaths.
Hopefully the day will come when dedicated roadways enable self-driving cars to travel at hundreds of miles per hour, without interference from cyclists or walkers or human drivers. That’s the autonomous version of the Interstate highway system.
But in the near-term, self-driving cars are going to have to adapt to the world as it exists. They’ll just be much safer than the human-driven cars on the road now. And that will mean a lot, for pedestrians especially.
Someday, when all vehicles are autonomous, it seems to me that things like stoplights will no longer be necessary. If the vehicles are aware enough of each other, traffic could steadily stream through an intersection in all directions simultaneously without anyone having to stop. But in such a world, if some backwards traditionalist insists on driving the old-fashioned way, they’ll do nothing but cause accidents. Is there a specific tipping point where these larger-scale infrastructural changes can happen organically, or will we have to hold out until manned vehicles are banned from public roads (either by the government or by insurance companies)?
This is a good question and nobody really knows the answer.
My best guess is that we’ll see these changes happen organically, but also very slowly.
A good comparison might be with electronic toll tags, although admittedly these are a much less disruptive technology.
According to Wikipedia, electronic toll collection debuted in Norway in 1986, side-by-side with cash toll collection.
It took 27 years before cash toll collection ceased on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. To this day, 30 years into the ETC era, half the toll lanes on the San Mateo Bridge (the closest Bay Area bridge to me) are cash lanes.
Infrastructure moves slowly.
So how would this happen with self-driving cars?
Maybe vehicle-to-vehicle communication will get good enough that cars can talk to each other and synchronize their movements. At first, it might just be Teslas talking with Teslas, and Fords talking with Fords, but maybe they’ll converge on a protocol over time.
Getting traffic lights to change on-command is a harder problem that know little about, so I won’t speculate there.
But my guess is that self-driving cars will have to operate in the world as they find it, not in the world we might like to have.
Delphi and Mobileye, two leading auto-parts suppliers, announced today that they are forming a partnership to develop a near-complete autonomous driving system by 2019. The plan is to create a mass-market, off-the-shelf system that can be plugged into a variety of vehicle types, from smaller cars to SUVs.
That’s interesting news. It sounds like they are going right at a market first attacked by Cruise and now by Comma.ai.
It’s unclear whether these systems will be sold directly to consumers, or to aftermarket automotive repair shops, or to OEMs.
And there’s this:
The companies say their Central Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) self-driving system will be Level 4 autonomous as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers. That would mean the automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather, but only in approved areas. However, when the system is active, a driver would not be required to pay attention to the road.
Today I will be speaking at Autonomous Vehicles 2016 on training autonomous vehicle engineers. If you’re in Detroit, come by the MGM Grand at 4pm (ticket required).
On Friday, Udacity will be hosting a self-driving car event at our Mountain View, California, headquarters, in conjunction with Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence. The event will feature our co-founder, Sebastian Thrun, and NVIDIA Senior Director of Automotive, Danny Shapiro.
Sebastian will be talking about his self-driving car story, from the DARPA Grand Challenge, through Google X, and up to our Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program today.
Danny will be talking about NVIDIA’s deep learning work and their latest advances in autonomous driving research.
Please come!
I will check on video recording and distribution for both of these events, and I’ll update this post when I find out.
Update: We will be live-streaming the Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence event with Sebastian and Danny Shapiro. It will start at 7pm PDT, and you can watch the stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2c8K-qp_xo
I’m headed out to Detroit this afternoon, where tomorrow I will be speaking at Autonomous Vehicles 2016, at the MGM Grand in Detroit.
My session will be at 4pm on Tuesday (tomorrow), and I’ll be speaking on training engineers to work on autonomous vehicles.
If you’re attending the conference, please come to this session! It will be fun and interactive, and you’ll leave with some great proposals for how to train yourself or your team to work on self-driving cars.
And please say hi after the session is over. I’d love to meet you!
If you’re not coming to the conference, maybe you should buy a ticket to Detroit and register for the event today!
Greg Ferenstein has a good summary of an OECD simulation published back in May.
“What if all conventional cars in a city were replaced by a fleet of shared self-driving vehicles”?
The results of this exercise were very interesting.
We carried out a simulation on a representation of the street network of the city of Lisbon, using origin and destination data derived from a fine-grained database of trips on the basis of a detailed travel survey.
The results were:
Total vehicles barely changed
Lots of land was freed up because parking was no longer necessary
Total vehicles driving at any one time decreased by 67%
Following up on Kyle Jepson’s second question from a few weeks ago:
My wife and I used to use Zipcar, but we had to give it up once we had our second kid because carrying two carseats the mile-and-a-half to the nearest Zipcar was just not possible. For the same reason, we never use Uber or Lyft — installing and uninstalling carseats is a pain, and having to lug them around with us at the store/park/church/etc. is even worse. But we love riding the bus and train because carseats aren’t required, so our kids can just sit on our laps or on the seat next to us. In a world where nobody owns a car (which is the world I’m rooting for), what will child safety look like? Will it be like public transit, where things like carseats aren’t needed, or will some other solution be needed (like perhaps having carseats available in the trunk)?
This seems like a scenario where the goal is pretty clear, but the question is how long it will take to get there.
Utopia
The goal is that driving would be basically as safe as taking the train and nobody would need seatbelts or carseats anymore.
That world seems pretty distant, if only because human drivers will still be rear-ending self-driving cars for decades to come.
The Future
In the nearer term, the goal is to be able to hail a self-driving taxi with as many adult seats and child carseats as necessary.
And in some future world where there are lots and lots of self-driving cars swarming around, each with different configurations, this isn’t too hard to imagine. It’ll be kind of like how Airbnb lets me select the number of bedrooms and bathrooms I need for a rental, plus whether it has to be pet-friendly, have a pool, have WiFi, free parking, a fire extinguisher, and a host of other “amenities”.
Problem solved.
Except, of course, even that world might be a little ways off. In the meantime what will happen?
The Short-Term
My best guess is that parents will be out in the cold. Fully autonomous vehicles will come first for commercial applications — long-haul trucking and deliver vehicles — and then for urban transportation in a several geo-fenced areas.
Children do not factor largely into either of those scenarios.
As the parent of an infant, this is frustrating, but it’s also just economics. The first waves of self-driving cars will be like Uber but without a driver, and, as Kyle points out, Uber is not optimized for kids. Parents don’t have enough money and kids are too small and disruptive a user base.
But if the world moves to self-driving cars, the law might become a burden and parents might lobby to lower the carseat age.
It might even be safer for children. Who knows, maybe riding with an adult seatbelt in a self-driving car that rarely crashes will be safer than riding in a booster seat with a harried mother or father who wrecks the car regularly.
Uber plans to put passengers in actual self-driving cars, starting this month (!):
For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop, and everything that happens is recorded by cameras inside and outside the car so that any glitches can be ironed out. Each car is also equipped with a tablet computer in the back seat, designed to tell riders that they’re in an autonomous car and to explain what’s happening. “The goal is to wean us off of having drivers in the car, so we don’t want the public talking to our safety drivers,” Krikorian says.
Furthermore, Uber just acquired Otto, the newest and hottest self-driving car (and truck) startup in San Francisco:
This fits perfectly into Uber’s strategy as the company doesn’t want to become a car manufacturer. Instead, Uber has been looking at partnerships with existing car manufacturers, such as Volvo, in order to turn their cars into self-driving cars using Uber’s proprietary technology. So get ready for Uber’s self-driving kit.
A month and a half ago I joined Udacity to build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program. Since then, we’ve been hard at work, and we’ll launch by the end of the year.
In the meantime, we quietly floated an announcement and asked about interest, just to make sure there would be somebody there to take the course when we built it.
True story: right before we launched Dhruv told me that we might cancel the program if we didn’t get 500 interested students, and I kind of freaked out a little.
Fortunately, we did a lot better than 500.
20,000 students from all over the globe have signed up to learn more about the program— Ushuaia to Hawaii to Tokyo to Tehran to Cabo Verde.
We even have somebody from my birthplace — Juneau, Alaska. If you’re reading this, hello, Juneau!
We are so excited to work with students from around the world.
I am particularly excited to see what students do with the tools we provide. I’m guessing there will be things to come out of this that we couldn’t have dreamed up.
So, thank you for signing up.
If you haven’t signed up yet, please sign up here! It helps keep me employed.
We’ll have the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program out to you soon 🙂
David Silver 