TRANSPORTATION INNOVATION
Automated cars are coming, but when?
Pulling his Tesla Model S onto Highway 1 from McGill Avenue, Bruce Sharpe clicks a lever on the steering column to engage its adaptive cruise control, which takes control of managing the car’s distance from the truck ahead and watches for vehicles around it.
Click it again and the car’s sensors and systems start to steer around a slight curve in the road following the centre of the lane. Sharpe’s hands are off the wheel, though hovering nearby in case he needs to take control.
“It does a great job of just tracking (the lane and surrounding traffic), so that you don’t have to do all of that steering yourself,” Sharpe said.
The car isn’t fully autonomous. Sharpe still has to be in control at all times and British Columbia doesn’t have a regulatory framework for fully driverless vehicles yet. But it is an example of what is possible now and a taste of the future for driverless transportation.
To optimists, that future will start arriving as soon as 2018 and it will usher in an era of increased road safety — as human-error crashes are reduced — and improved mobility for seniors and the disabled who don’t drive. For Metro Vancouver, that could mean reducing the thousands of road crashes recorded each year by the Insurance Corp. of B.C., a policy paper issued by TransLink last August showed. In 2013, the report said, the region had 61,000 crashes.
TransLink and the City of Vancouver are among the local agencies considering the potential for autonomous transportation to alter long-term urban planning.
A Seattle-based venture capital group has proposed designating a lane of the Interstate 5 highway as a testing ground for autonomous transportation on the 240-kilometre section between Seattle and Vancouver to spur innovation in the region and ease congestion.
“This is going to happen,” said Tom Alberg, co-founder of Madrona Venture Group and co-author of the proposal.
It may take five years or 10 years before it becomes widespread, he said, but “why not start planning for this now?”
The rosiest of visionaries look a couple of decades ahead to sharing of autonomous cars interlinked with transit and other transportation options to solve traffic congestion in big cities.
In some respects, that future seems tantalizingly close.
Every week, it seems, advanced test projects make the news, such as Uber’s launch of 100 Volvomade driverless taxis in Pittsburgh (with human drivers, just in case), or a 190-kilometre trip by an autonomous highway truck in Colorado (with the driver monitoring from the cab’s sleeper) conducted by the tech startup Otto.
Sharpe, however, is doubtful of the most optimistic timelines.
He’s an ordinary driver, but as a Surrey-based software developer, he has some familiarity with “how easy it is to get fooled by early successes.”
“You think you’ve kind of solved the problem, but to really, really solve the problem and all the different, unusual circumstances that arise, that takes a lot of time, and I think that’s going to be the way for self driving.”
He is something of an evangelist for electric cars, though, as vice-president of the Vancouver Electric Car Association and an advocate for the benefits of autonomous transportation. Sharpe believes the future of transportation is “both autonomous driving and the electrification of (vehicles).”
For now, “(the) way to think of it is it’s a step along the way, but really at a level where it is driverassistance,” Sharpe said of his own car’s capabilities.
Tesla impresario Elon Musk, however, is more impatient about government approval of the latest generation of his company’s autopilot technology, which he is referring to as autonomous-ready.
A Model S sedan vehicle using a first-generation autopilot had a fatal crash in Florida in May.
The vehicle’s camera failed to distinguish between the white side of a transport truck turning across its path and the bright sky in front of it and its systems didn’t brake to avoid a collision.
Musk, on Oct. 19, announced that from now on, all Teslas will have the hardware — the cameras, sensors and computing power — to be driverless, as soon as the software is ready and regulations accommodate them. He is urging regulators to catch up.
Transport Canada, which is responsible for setting safety standards for vehicles on Canadian roads, hasn’t approved any fully autonomous systems for sale. And B.C., which is responsible for licensing vehicles, doesn’t allow them either, Ministry of Transportation spokeswoman Trish Rorison said.
The ministry did not make an official available for an interview, but in an emailed statement, Rorison said it does have a working group that is “monitoring the development of autonomous vehicles” being tested.
It is work that will take time, Rorison said, while the technology continues to evolve and Transport Canada develops criteria for the manufacturers of driverless systems to meet.
To really, really solve the problem and all the different, unusual circumstances that arise, that takes a lot of time.
The speed at which self-driving technology is advancing is proving to be a challenge to regulators, said Mark Francis, manager of vehicle registration and licensing at ICBC.
“This is a challenge that (the U.S. National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration) has identified,” Francis said. “The current regulatory framework isn’t adaptable or nimble enough to keep up with the technology.”
What officials don’t want is to write a set of regulations obsolete as soon as they’re implemented.
Francis co-chairs a national committee for the Canadian Council of Motor Transportation Administrators grappling with writing recommendations for Transport Canada and the provinces on the issues of standards and regulation.
He is also one of two Canadian representatives on their counterpart committee at the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
“From the motor-vehicle administrator perspective, we don’t want to be obstacles,” Francis said. “We want to be enablers so the technology can be used on our roads as early as safely possible.”
For the moment, North American jurisdictions are looking to the U.S., where most of the testing of autonomous systems is being done, for leadership.
The U.S. National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration has issued loose guidelines for manufacturers, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. In September, the state of California proposed a set of draft regulations for public comment.
Francis said in Canada, Ontario is the only province to establish regulations allowing the testing of autonomous systems, which it did in January. So far, Ontario has had no takers.
Francis said Canadian regulators are waiting for the U.S. to finalize its standards, which Transport Canada will examine and tailor to meet any Canadian differences before imposing them on manufacturers selling vehicles in Canada.
Francis said his group is working on its own set of recommendations for regulations, which will likely be ready early next year, but implementation will take longer. They are trying to avoid creating a patchwork of regulations across the country.
“Most manufacturers are talking about 2020 before they are ready to deploy,” Francis said.
Bad weather — heavy precipita- tion that can confound radar sensors, and snow and ice conditions that obscure lane markings — are among the biggest factors that automation technology needs to overcome.
“The technology sees heavy precipitation as other objects,” Francis said. “We need to see the technology become more mature, enough that it is ready and safe to be deployed (in all conditions.)”
In trucking, weather is one of the reasons manufacturers consider the autonomous systems they are developing as more driver-assistance than driver-replacement.
Uptake of new safety features is “not huge, because of the number of factors that render it to be not all that effective,” said Jason Wheeler, vice-president of Canadian operations for the truck and heavy-equipment dealer Inland Group.
Truck drivers will still need to be in place to take over when autonomous technology is confounded by weather, Wheeler said, and be on hand to hook up and unhook trailers, put chains on tires and other tasks.
Two-lane highways with twoway traffic and wildlife on roads are other, more complex conditions for cameras and sensors to interpret, said Derek Rotz, director of advanced engineering for Daimler Trucks North America.
“The first version we envision is more of freeway-type highways,” Rotz said. “Highway Pilot, is what we call it,” which will be a degree of automation that allows systems to take over temporarily when conditions are right, but still require drivers to be in control and ready to take over.
That, he added, is still a few years away. So far, Daimler only has one truck licensed for testing in the U.S., in Nevada, and they need permission to test from more states for longer-distance trials.
“It’s more of an evolution than revolution,” Rotz said.
Still, Rotz said developers anticipate safety gains by reducing driver fatigue that can occur even when just steering to keep a truck straight in high winds. Also, trucks travelling in a consistent, defensive manner can be safer for the traffic around them.
And the autonomous systems will operate as a second set of eyes on the road that will always be on, Rotz said.
“It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t get emotional about things, it just does its job,” he said.
There is still public skepticism about the technology, which is another reason for regulators to move more quickly.
“At this point, until people can engage with the technology, you will get some that are really enthusiastic and some who will answer, ‘No, I don’t like the idea a bit,’” said Annalisa Meyboom, director of the Transportation Infrastructure and Public Space Lab at the University of B.C.
Meyboom is interested in running trials with autonomous shuttle vehicles to test people’s impressions.
In the long term, society will also have to grapple with the disruptive nature of the technology, because “it’s going to disrupt a lot of things,” Meyboom said.
“How do we approach this from (the angle of ) all the people who are put out of work because robots are going to drive?”