Author pumped about driverless automobiles
There’s a brave new world on the horizon, where you can travel in your bathrobe.
A Windsor-born writer and a Michigan automotive expert have penned a new book exploring the strange race to develop driverless technology. Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car — And How It Will Reshape Our World also examines the way technology will revolutionize society, and our travel habits, in the not so distant future.
“If you want to go to New York City for a weekend with your partner, you get in your pyjamas, hire a car — but it’s a car with a bed — and get in, fall asleep and wake up eight hours later in New York fresh and ready,” said co-author Christopher Shulgan, 45, who grew up in Windsor.
“It makes all these different iterations of vehicles really easy.” Shulgan co-wrote the book with family friend Lawrence D. Burns, an adviser to Google’s driverless car project and the former corporate vice-president of research, development and planning at General Motors.
It focuses on a team with the Google project, now called Waymo. The story begins at a 2004 off-road robot race in the Mojave Desert. “It’s a crazy story over and above actually being this important thing that’s going to change society,” said Shulgan.
“Basically this group of engineers get together in these races that an obscure arm of the U.S. military stages in the California desert in the early 2000s. These guys realized before anyone else, ‘Whoa, this driverless car stuff is possible.’ But then nobody funds it because of the 2008 recession.” Those engineers all parted ways and went about their lives, until Google called.
“It’s kind of like Ocean’s 11, when Ocean picks up the guys who are off working at Subway or something,” said Shulgan. “These genius selfdriving car engineers were off doing totally different stuff. Then a guy from Google picks them up and says, hey, you guys want to work on that cool thing you did in university? Then not only that, the guy from Google says we’re going to make you super rich if you can actually do this.”
He got the idea for the book around 2015 or 2016, when there was “a lot of buzz” about driverless technology.
Shulgan asked Burns if he were interested in working on a book. Not only was Burns interested, said Shulgan, but he offered some “compelling ” ideas.
“The epiphany here is that driverless cars were going to be a thing, we saw that,” said Shulgan. “But what Larry figured out before anybody else, and why he was such a great person to author this book, is that driverless cars make possible a convergence of a bunch of different things.”
It will make travel cheaper and easier than ever before, said Shulgan. Instead of owning a car, you will be able to subscribe to services that provide driverless transportation or pick up your dry cleaning and groceries.
He said driverless technology will also help the spread of electric cars by making them more practical.
“They just go off to their own service area and charge themselves,” said Shulgan. “Then it also makes ride sharing way easier. So what you get is these driverless taxis zipping about urban areas providing rides to anybody. That ends up being a fraction of the cost of personal car ownership.”
With driverless vehicles also comes drastically new, and much more comfortable, modes of transportation. Shulgan likened it to Uber, which allows the passenger to order different kinds and sizes of cars.
“In the same way, you’ll be able to get different kinds of cars,” he said. “You’ll be able to get a sleeper car. You’ll be able to get an SUV. You’ll be able to get just a two-person mobility pod. It makes all of that possible.”
While it all has the ring of science fiction, it’s not that far away. “Waymo has said that they’ll have a commercial service in the Phoenix area this year,” said Shulgan. “They have 2 ½ months left to do it. I think it’s going to be tight. Cruz, which is GM’s self-driving car subsidiary, has said they’ll be up and running in San Francisco in 2019. Then Ford just said yesterday they ’ll be up and running in Washington, D.C., in 2021.
“So it pops up in various places, and from there it will spread.”