Breaking the Law

Is it ethical to program a robot to break the law?

Is it good business practice?

It seems like these questions will come up a lot in the future of self-driving cars. In fact, I bet they already have arisen, although I don’t know if any specific cases and how they’ve been handled.

The simplest case might be, is it legal to program a car to exceed the speed limit by 1 mph?

Or what about executing a three-point turn in the middle of an alley blocked off by a delivery truck?

It seems like a vehicle that perfectly followed all traffic laws might work great most of the time, but would occasionally come to a dead stop for hours, or days, on end, until an obstruction cleared.

It’s not clear to me how legislators and police should handle these situations, either.

Logistics Trends

DHL has released the latest version of their Logistics Trend Report. The report breaks out two types of autonomous vehicles — aerial and ground.

Ground Logistics

The section on ground autonomous logistics is interesting and covers a lot of what we already know. DHL is using autonomous vehicles within warehouses. They will gradually move the vehicles into outdoor settings and then into uncontrolled environments (i.e. public streets) over time. Autonomous highway trucking will be important. The last mile problem will be the final issue to be resolved.

I was interested to see that DHL lists autonomous vehicles as having “high” potential impact on logistics, but they set the time frame as “> 5 years”.

Aerial Logistics

The more interesting section, for me, was their overview of “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles”. Note that this term subtly different from “autonomous” although the details don’t explore that distinction.

Many of the UAV points might seem obvious in retrospect, but I hadn’t thought of them before.

UAVs will basically become important for logistics in two scenarios:

  1. Where the value of a new service is high enough to justify the cost.
  2. Where the cost of an existing service is so high that it’s more economical to use UAVs than to continue the service.

An example of the first situation is aerial surveillance. The report states:

UAVs can monitor sites and assets to prevent theft and report suspected damage or maintenance requirements. They can also be used to coordinate major logistics operations on the ground.

An example of the second scenario is:

Rural delivery using UAVs is attractive for remote regions
that have limited logistics infrastructure or are hazardous
to access (e.g., islands during rough weather conditions,
villages located in mountain ranges). Logistics providers
can set up emergency delivery services (e.g., medicines)
for these communities.

It’s a brave new world ahead.

Greenfields vs. Infill

I recently read two interesting articles about real estate development — one on greenfields and one on urban development.

The first article, by Lyman Stone, hypothesizes that American history is largely the history of greenfields. Over time, people have moved from the populated urban centers of the East Coast, and into undeveloped land in the West.

Stone’s hypothesis is that greenfields are much attractive to people than building more densely-populated urban centers. So much so that Stone advocates encouraging dying urban centers to just die already so that we can later re-develop them as greenfields.

Stone doesn’t tie this hypothesis to self-driving cars, but he does talk a lot about commuting costs and it’s not hard to see how autonomous vehicles will greatly expand the scope of practical greenfield development. This is particularly true in a population-sparse country like the United States.

The second article I read took the opposite tack. A report out of the U.K. estimates that self-driving vehicles will free up road and parking space in cities, opening perhaps 20% of the city for redevelopment.

This infill story is the opposite of the greenfield story, although of course they’re not mutually exclusive.

But I do wonder whether self-driving cars will cause a bigger revolution in urban or rural living.

In the short-term, my money is on urban living, since it will take longer for self-driving cars to work in rural areas.

But in the long-term, my bet is that self-driving cars will change rural-life in ways we can’t even imagine.

Rumor Mill: The Apple Car

One of the great mysteries of the self-driving car industry is what, if anything, Apple is building.

A related question is where are they building it?

Like most watchers, I assumed Apple was building its car in Cupertino, and there have been rumors and leaks to that effect.

But a German newspaper recently reported that maybe Apple is building its car team in Berlin.

Working backwards, there is some logic to this.

  1. Apple is famously secretive and Berlin is more discrete and lower-profile than Silicon Valley.
  2. Germany has a lot of great automotive engineers.

Or this could turn out to be just another unsubstantiated rumor about the Apple Car.

Safety Testing

The RAND Corporation just released a study hypothesizing that auto companies will not be able to prove the safety of self-driving cars in any feasible amount of time.

The key findings of the study are:

Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.

Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.

Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety.

Developers of this technology and third-party testers will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability.

Even with these methods, it may not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain.

In parallel to developing new testing methods, it is imperative to develop adaptive regulations that are designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.

The study includes some sophisticated econometrics and comes across as an exercise in applied math more than anything else.

Which isn’t to say that the study is wrong.

But I would be curious for a comparison between safety testing for autonomous vehicles and safety testing for new car models, or even airplanes. Or maybe let’s look at how Henry Ford safety-tested the Model T way back when.

I suspect there are situations in which this is a solved problem, and hopefully we can learn something from those scenarios that we can then apply to self-driving cars.

My New Job

I am excited to write that on Monday, April 18th, I started a new job as a autonomous vehicle engineer at Ford Motor Company!

I work in Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in beautiful Palo Alto, California.

As you can imagine, I am incredibly enthusiastic about self-driving cars and I am thrilled to be working on them with one of the most advanced OEMs in the business. I am grateful to Ford for the opportunity!

Initially I was worried I might have to wind down my self-driving car posts as part of the new job, but it turns out Ford has a fairly open and well-defined social media policy.

Having taken Ford’s social media training during my first week, I will now make clear two things:

  1. I am work at Ford.
  2. I do not speak for Ford in my posts here. These posts are my own opinions and thoughts.

I will need to be a little circumspect about my new job, as a lot of the information is proprietary, but I think I am on safe ground saying that I will be splitting time between the domain controller group and the machine learning group, both on Ford’s autonomous vehicle team.

Wish me luck!

Autonomous Vehicles: China Update

Volvo: The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo announced plans to test self-driving cars in China.

Chang’an Automobile: The Chinese manufacturer just completed a test run of self-driving cars over 2000km (1200 miles) from Chongqing to Beijing.

The cars successfully drove distance from other vehicles, changed lanes, overtook and performed other manoeuvres, including three-point turns automatically but still need the help of a driver in certain road sections and gas stations, the designers said.

Ford Initiatives

Barron’s has an article out touting Ford’s advanced initiatives in electric and self-driving cars.

Among the Ford programs Barron’s highlights:

  • Ford Mobility — a subsidiary focused on gathering data for new business opportunities
  • Ford is the leading seller of plug-in hybrid vehicles in the U.S.
  • Ford’s fully autonomous vehicle test fleet will reach 30 vehicles by the end of 2016 — that’s more vehicles than any other company’s fleet
  • Autonomous vehicle testing in Michigan, California, and Arizona
  • GoPark — a parking app
  • GoDrive — a car-rental service
  • FordPass — a premium membership program

There’s a lot going on.