Letting go of the wheel on our streets
Maybe — probably, even — autonomous vehicles will one day be as commonplace as cars driven by human beings.
In the meantime, it's fascinating to watch the technical advances and legal grappling moving us away from there always being a person behind the wheel of the transit machines rolling down our streets and highways.
The question right now for Angeleno motorists watching with great interest the autonomous experiments on the streets of Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Francisco is: Will the recent suspension of General Motors' Cruise driverless taxis in San Francisco after one rolled over a pedestrian result in a significant re-thinking of the whole human-free experiment, or is this just a small, well, bump in the road?
Gov. Gavin Newsom, for one, says he “absolutely” supports the Cruise suspension.
But a San Francisco Chronicle investigation into what really happened shows this was hardly a case of a robot gone very wrong. The pedestrian had first been hit by a car driven by someone who was very human indeed who fled the scene. “The force of the collision on Fifth Street hurled the victim into the path of a Cruise driverless taxi, which braked hard but ran the woman over,” the Chronicle reports. “What the robotaxi did during those crucial seconds — and what the company did in the days afterward as it sought to respond to the accident — are now the subject of investigations by state and federal authorities that could represent a landmark moment for an emerging technology.” And that's because the DMV says that company officials originally withheld from investigators footage from the car's video camera that shows the taxi “performing a postincident `pullover maneuver' with the woman still under the chassis.” (Cruise disputes the charge.)
In other words, “pullover maneuver,” good — glad to see the robot wants to get out of traffic after a crash. But “woman still under the chassis” — very bad robot indeed.
Especially since robots never drive drunk or fall asleep at the wheel, they one day will rule the road.
But this experiment — what one documentary on Tesla terms a “Crash Course” — has a long way to go. Companies involved need to be fully upfront about safety issues as we learn to let go of the wheel.