Pall on testing of self-driving cars
Les voitures autonomes sont-elles vraiment sûres ?
En mars dernier, un véhicule autonome d’Uber tuait une cycliste dans la ville de Tempe, en Arizona. Jusqu’à ce drame, l’Arizona était l’un des états américains autorisant les tests de voitures autonomes sur les routes publiques. Ce dramatique accident a relancé le débat sur ces véhicules censés être aptes à rouler sans l’intervention d’un conducteur. Cette technologie est-elle vraiment au point ?
SAN FRANCISCO — Arizona officials saw opportunity when Uber and other companies began testing driverless cars a few years ago. Promising to keep oversight light, they invited the companies to test their robotic vehicles on the state’s roads. Then on Sunday night, an autonomous car operated by Uber — and with an emergency backup driver behind the wheel — struck and killed a woman on a street in Tempe, Arizona. It was believed to be the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving technology. The company quickly suspended testing in Tempe as well as in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.
A YOUNG TECHNOLOGY
2. The accident was a reminder that self-driving technology is still in the experimental stage, and governments are still trying to figure out how to regulate it. Uber, Waymo and a long list of tech companies and automakers have begun to expand testing of their self-driving vehicles in cities around the country. The companies say the cars will be safer than regular cars simply because they take easily distracted humans out of the driving equation. But the technology is still only about a decade old, and just now starting to experience the unpredictable situations that drivers can face.
ATTRACTING TESTING OPERATIONS
3. Much of the testing of autonomous cars has taken place in a piecemeal regulatory environ-
ment. Some states, like Arizona, have taken a lenient approach to regulation. Arizona officials wanted to lure companies working on selfdriving technology out of neighboring California, where regulators had been less receptive. But regulators in California and elsewhere have become more accommodating lately. Federal policymakers have also considered a lighter touch. A Senate bill, if passed, would free autonomous-car makers from some existing safety standards and pre-empt states from creating their own vehicle safety laws.
4. The Uber car, a Volvo XC90 SUV outfitted with the company’s sensing system, was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel but carrying no passengers when it struck Elaine Herzberg, a 49-year-old woman. Tempe, with its dry weather and wide roads, was considered an ideal place to test autonomous vehicles. In 2015, Arizona officials declared the state a regulation-free zone in order to attract testing operations from companies like Uber, Waymo and Lyft. “We needed our message to Uber, Lyft and other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to be that Arizona was open to new ideas,” Doug Ducey, Arizona’s governor, said in an interview in June 2017.
WITH OR WITHOUT DRIVERS
5. Since late last year, Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has been using cars without a human in the driver’s seat to pick up and drop off passengers in Arizona. Most testing of driverless cars occurs with a safety driver in the front seat who is available to take over if something goes wrong. It can be challenging, however, to take control of a fast-moving vehicle.
6. California requires companies to report the number of instances when human drivers are forced to take over for the autonomous vehicle, called “disengagements.” Between December 2016 and November 2017, Waymo’s self-driving cars drove about 350,000 miles and human drivers retook the wheel 63 times — an average of about 5,600 miles between every disengagement.
TEACHING THE SYSTEM TO ADJUST
7. Researchers working on autonomous technology have struggled with how to teach the systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior. Still, most researchers believe self-driving cars will ultimately be safer than their human counterparts.
8. In 2016, a man driving his Tesla using Autopilot, the car company’s self-driving feature, died on a state highway in Florida when his car crashed into a tractor-trailer that was crossing the road. Federal regulators later ruled there were no defects in the system to cause the accident. 9. But the crash in Tempe will draw attention among the general public to self-driving cars, said Michael Bennett, an associate research professor at Arizona State University who has been looking into how people respond to driverless cars and artificial intelligence. “We’ve imagined an event like this as a huge inflection point for the technology and the companies advocating for it,” he said. “They’re going to have to do a lot to prove that the technology is safe.”