MOTOR MOUTH
ARE YOU READY FOR THE ZOMBIE-CAR APOCALYPSE?
Zombie cars? Seriously? Who in their right mind thinks this is a problem? I mean it’s bad enough that my kid’s friends all talk about zombies as if they’re real, arguing about the undead — how to kill them, the ramifications of mating with the undead and, perhaps more importantly, at least if I heard the conversation right, if the coming zombie apocalypse might curtail their fast food dining — as if this might be a situation they will actually face in real life.
And, oh my good Lord, if you thought John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was a cinematic stretch too far, how about Abraham Lincoln versus Zombies, in which the 10-yearold future saviour of the American republic beheads his mother with a scythe because, well, he thinks she might be turning into the walking dead.
Now I get why a typical 10-year-old (though not an Abraham Lincoln, of course) might be afraid of what Merriam-Webster defines as the “willless and speechless human,” but exactly how a car — an inanimate object, I’ll remind you — can be invaded by West Indian supernatural voodoo powers is just another part of the whole zombie thing I don’t understand.
Nonetheless, “zombie” cars would appear to be a problem, a problem, in fact, stoking so much fear in the state of Massachusetts that it has been deemed worthy of a bill calling for, if not the extinction of zombie cars, at least the taxing of them.
No, I am not making this up. And yes, even by the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test commedia dell’arte that now passes for governance south of the border, this one is weird.
First of all, “zombie” cars, as defined by Massachusetts Democratic state Sen. Jason Lewis, are self-driving cars that drive around city streets — one presumes aimlessly and without mission — so their owners don’t have to pay parking fees. And, as with pretty much everything American, Lewis doesn’t seem so much worried about the consequences of zombie cars roaming our streets as ensuring that the “driving dead” pay their share of road taxes.
Ostensibly, this tax on self-driving is a result of the reduced gas tax self-driving cars will pay. Lewis’s bill, showing that Democrats are not much less idealistic than their Republican counterparts, also mandates that all future self-driving cars in the Bay State be electric. But here’s the thing: The bill would increase the basic 2.5-cent-a-mile tariff specifically for autonomous “zombie” (yes, according to the Worcester Business Journal, the senator used that word) automobiles for “each mile driven without a passenger.”
Now, with self-driving cars causing so much confusion lately (recent studies seem to suggest that while 40 per cent of consumers may want them and 40 per cent may not, 100 per cent of consumers don’t understand the first damned thing about them), it would be easy to assume that this infestation of aimlessly wandering Fords might be right around the corner. But, in fact, while the media hype surrounding autonomous automobiles might have you believe that the robots will be taking over our steering wheels in the next few months, the truth is that you probably won’t be able to buy a car that can drive around a city’s core all by itself for at least a decade. And it will be probably be another 15 years after that before they become, well, a problem large enough to merit Sen. Lewis’s paranoia.
The most advanced autonomy commercially available now is — as defined by the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — level II, which are cars that provide aid to the driver but whose automated functions must be constantly monitored by a human being. Even next-gen experimental cars, being tested in some states under special permits, are what’s deemed Level III and IV, the best of which are “designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip.” But they are all limited to a specific “operational design domain (ODD)” and are not designed for negotiating the trickiest of traffic situations. Even the most advanced of these experimental vehicles still require a driver behind the wheel and are hardly ready to drive autonomously in difficult circumstances.
Indeed, the specific conditions that Level IV “High Autonomy” autonomous vehicles will eventually be allowed to drive in without human assistance will be, for the foreseeable future, limited. Divided highways will be under their purview (and won’t they be a boon in Canada’s ever-worsening traffic jams?) as will certain routes with minimal traffic. (The much ballyhooed NuTonomy self-driving taxi service in Singapore is limited to the city’s little-travelled business district, and there will be drivers behind the wheel).
Before a car can drive around, to quote Merriam-Webster again, “willless,” in downtown city cores, it will have to achieve the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Level V. This level of “Full Autonomy” allows “the full-time performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task under all roadway and environmental conditions that can be managed by a human driver.”
In other words, before a car will be allowed to roam our city streets completely unattended, the technology will have to increase three levels from the most advanced, high-tech Mercedes-Benz being sold today. And that, folks, is something that just isn’t happening soon.
Even Google is backing off the concept of autobots running around without steering wheels. Most large automakers — Ford may or may not prove to be an exception — are extremely limiting in how much autonomy they want to allow, fearful, as they have every right to be, about who bears responsibility (both physically and fiscally) for these cars when they crash.
We found out at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that while current experimental self-driving cars are extremely capable of navigating controlled-traffic situations, they are easily flustered — step forward, Nissan and Hyundai — by circumstances that human drivers would find quite ordinary. For instance, the best of autonomous cars still have trouble passing a stationary work truck on a narrow street if it requires crossing over the verboten-for-a-computer-controlled-car median’s dual yellow line, and recognizing semi-trucks is still a problem for some autonomous systems.
Even after such cars are introduced, it will be another decade or two before such fully autonomous automobiles will find widespread adoption. The typical lifespan of a new automobile is about 12 years, so it will require a generation or perhaps even two before there are a sufficient number of Level V driverless cars aimlessly circumnavigating Boston’s hoity-toity Back Bay district trying to avoid parking fees.
Despite Lewis’s seemingly deep-rooted fear, the “zombie car” apocalypse is not upon us.