Robot rides may force error-prone human motorists off the road
New rules of the road for robot cars coming out of Washington this week could lead to the eventual extinction of one of the defining archetypes of the past century: the human driver.
While banning people from driving may seem like something from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, it’s the logical endgame of a technology that could dramatically reduce — or even eliminate — the 1.25 million road deaths a year globally. Human error is the cause of 94 percent of roadway fatalities, U.S. safety regulators say, and robot drivers never get drunk, sleepy or distracted.
Autonomous cars already have “superhuman intelligence” that allows them to see around corners and avoid crashes, said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia Corp., a maker of high-speed processors for self-driving cars.
“Long term, these vehicles will drive better than any human possibly can,” Shapiro said. “We’re not there yet, but we will get there sooner than we believe.”
Regulators are accelerating the shift with new rules that will provide a path for going fully driverless by removing the requirement that a human serve as a backup. Earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recognized Google’s self-driving software as the “driver” in its fully autonomous test vehicles, eliminating the need for a person to be present.
This week, technology industry veterans proposed a ban on human drivers on a 150-mile (241-kilometer) stretch of Interstate 5 from Seattle to Vancouver. Within five years, human driving could be outlawed in congested city centers like London, on college campuses and at airports, said Kristin Schondorf, executive director of automotive transportation at consultant EY.
The first driver-free zones will be well-defined and digitally mapped, giving autonomous cars longrange vision and a 360-degree view of their surroundings, Schondorf said. The I-5 proposal would start with self-driving vehicles using car-pool lanes and expand over a decade to robot rides taking over the road during peak driving times.
“In city centers, you don’t even want non-automated vehicles; they would just ruin the whole point of why you have a smart city,” said Schondorf, a former engineer at Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. “It makes it a dumb city.”
John Krafcik, head of Google’s self-driving car project, said in an August interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that the tech giant is developing cars without steering wheels and gas or brake pedals because “we need to take the human out of the loop.”
Ford Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields echoed that sentiment last month when he said the 113-yearold automaker would begin selling robot taxis with no steering wheel or pedals in 2021.
“Problems with drivers not paying attention or getting sleepy or getting drunk are really ripe for autonomous to do a better job than humans,” said Ron Medford, director of safety at Google’s self-driving car program and former deputy administrator of the NHTSA.
With mobile devices an added distraction, U.S. highway fatalities rose 8 percent last year, the biggest increase in 50 years. Some 38,300 people were killed on the road in 2015 and 4.4 million were seriously injured, according to the National Safety Council. Globally, 1.25 million people die in car crashes annually, according to the World Health Organization.
“Behind the wheel, we are only human and we are expected to screw up,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General MotorsCarnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. “There will come a point in time where we should not be allowed to drive.”
Not so fast, say some safety advocates, who point to the grisly death of a Tesla Motors driver while he had his car on autopilot in May.
“There’s tremendous skepticism still today about driverless cars,” said Joan Claybrook, an auto-safety watchdog and former administrator of the NHTSA. “These are just computers, and computers break down.”
Self-driving cars still struggle to operate in snow and fog. Plus, they can’t yet comprehend social aspects of everyday driving, such as head nods and hand gestures at four-way stops.