SELF- DRIVING CARS WAY OF THE FUTURE
David Booth beat an autonomous Audi, but he expects his victory will be short- lived as such high- tech cars get smarter
Modestly talented, only slightly brain- damaged auto journalist: 1; high- tech self- driving Audi RS 7: 0. Yep, unlike Garry Kasparov — who famously distressed a then- analogue world when he lost his first chess game to IBM’s Deep Blue — your suddenly not- so- humble Motor Mouth has stepped into the digital arena, stared down the microchip and ( surprising even himself ) emerged victorious.
Admittedly, such braggadocio would seem unbecoming, especially since neither man ( that would be me) nor machine ( the Audi’s MicroAutobox Electronic Control Unit) were threatening lap records when racing around Sonoma Raceway in Audi’s “piloted driving” challenge. But, though the results show I beat the automated Audi by some 4.5 seconds, I suspect the time when I, or anyone else, will trump a computer- controlled car will soon to come to an end.
If there’s a surprise in all the hullabaloo surrounding Audi’s attacking racetracks with its automated automobiles, it is that the self- driving technology that allows an RS 7 to race around circuits is truly in its infancy.
Indeed, the racing- red RS 7 — nicknamed Robby after Audi-racing Bobby Unser’s son — that proved so admirably speedy around this diabolically twisty California track is actually fairly crude. Contrary to the street-going, self- driving Google cars with “visual” sensors that can detect squirrel and human alike, Robby has no cameras and could not, as its higher- tech confreres can, “see” anything in front of it.
In fact, the RS 7 was running on simple GPS positioning, the same basic technology that gets your iPhone so lost. Indeed, programming Robby to race around Sonoma couldn’t be simpler: A handler took the Audi out for two laps — one on the very outside of the track, one on the immediate inside — to feed topographic co- ordinates ( a data point for every five centimetres) into its hard drive. After that, some very impressive software plotted the quickest line around the entire track, optimizing braking points, determining maximum cornering speed and deciding when the 560- horsepower RS 7 should mat its twin- turbocharged throttle and when it should be feathered — again, all without any visual feedback.
It is the computerized equivalent of Sebastian Vettel, blindfolded, racing his Formula One Ferrari around Monaco, relying solely on his memory. That an “unseeing” automated Audi could be so fast after just two laps of reconnaissance ( I can barely find the pit lane after two laps, let alone an apex) is further proof that motoring will likely be a lot safer when the age of self- driving is upon us ( worries of a Terminator: Rise of the Machines driving dystopia notwithstanding).
This is especially true, because the cars Audi is testing on actual roads are so much more sophisticated than Robby. Lasers, four 30- frames- per- second video cameras and dual mid- and longrange radar sensors all “see” the hazards — moving and stationary — that a car is likely to face on everyday streets. The zFAS system’s quad- core, 2.3- GHz CPU processes all the data and links it instantaneously with the “cloud.” And even though Audi will initially restrict its cars’ self- driving autonomy to the Traffic Jam Assist system’s 40- kilometres- an- hour limit, an RS 7 named Jack — as in “we have hit the jackpot” — drove all the way from San Francisco to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show in January without any human assistance.
Indeed, Audi is already moving on from focusing on autonomous driving as merely a technological challenge, to working on the legal/ infrastructural/ psychological changes needed for a self- driving future. Much of the discussion of legislating autonomous driving has focused on how cars will avoid vehicle- to- vehicle/ metal- to- machine conflict and who will be responsible in an accident involving a robotic automobile, but Klaus Verweyen, Audi’s senior manager of automated driving functions, said dealing with the multi- jurisdictional legal rules of driving will prove equally challenging.
For example, Ontario’s new don’t-drive- through- an- intersection-until- the pedestrian- is-on-the- sidewalk rule is unique in Canada. Toronto allows righthand turns on red lights, but Montreal doesn’t. With 10 provinces and three territories — not to mention the 48 mainland states in the U. S. — accommodating each jurisdiction’s driving peccadillos will surely be a daunting task.
Changing our legislators’ views on what constitutes distracted driving — especially since selfdriving cars will sometimes still be manually piloted — may pose another headache. Under current laws banning texting and talking on cellphones, the person behind the wheel of a car being autonomously driven would probably be bored to the point of coma, dulling reaction times and the ability to take over driving in the case of an emergency.
Yes, iPhoning and Angry Birding while actually driving will most certainly slow your reaction to danger, but Verweyen says those same activities might, in fact, heighten your ability to respond while being driven.
Verweyen said Audi’s research on Human Machine Interface reveals that people want to be distracted when they are being “driven.” The next- generation Level 3 autonomy — the car basically drives by itself but requires a driver behind the wheel to take over in an emergency — may still require human intervention from time to time. And Audi’s research reveals that a driver behind the wheel of an autonomous automobile is more alert if occupied with entertaining tasks.
In 1996, the greatest chess player the world has ever known was so incredulous at losing to a computer that he accused IBM of cheating, implying that the computer giant was actually using a human grandmaster to surreptitiously control Deep Blue’s supposedly programmed moves. Kasparov’s contention — at that time shared by almost everyone — was that a mere machine could not defeat the superior intellect of the human mind.
Twenty years on, no one disputes the greater processing power of the computer. And — my fluky ministrations aside — there’s little doubt that a computer- controlled car will be a safer car.