DRIVERS UNWANTED
THE FUTURE OF THE AUTONOMOUS CAR IS SUDDENLY ALL ABOUT WHAT GOVERNMENTS WANT, NOT PEOPLE.
There’s a brave new world coming — the world of the driverless car. It’s coming so fast it might even be at your door by 2020, a transformative and disruptive tech revolution that will make wireless and the Internet look like children’s toys.
Driverless — or autonomous or automated — cars are the perfect blend of some of the greatest freedom-enabling technologies of the 20th century: The automobile, the Internet, wireless, computers, artificial intelligence. Vehicles will steer themselves through traffic, interfacing with other vehicles, road signals, GPS mapping and other devices to whisk passengers to their destinations, little or no driver required. Freedom! Or maybe not. Inside the driverless car is a collection of big-time back-seat drivers with agendas that have little to do with satisfying consumers or giving people transportation choice. In policy circles, the driverless car has already been turned into a vehicle for achieving the broader social and economic objectives of the new urban utopians. In this brave new world of driverless cars Big Brother is at the wheel.
The build- up of hype is growing daily, from tech reports, investment promoters, corporate PR, policy wonks, urban planners, big- name consultants, media, futurists, think- tanks, marketing departments, technologists and governments.
Spurred by blasts of driverless promotion at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the Detroit auto show this week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced Thursday t hat t he next Obama budget will propose US$4 billion in spending over 10 years to develop U.S. policy on “automated vehicles.”
Notably, Foxx did not say “driverless” or “autonomous” — automated apparently being the word for cars that would include a driver of some kind. But Foxx did use language that is now standard in the razzle-dazzle world of the driverless car. “We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse- gas emissions and transform mobility for the American people.”
That’s t he l i berating technological promise now on offer from the biggest corporate names on the planet, from carmakers to Internet firms to investment bankers: Google, Apple, Ford, Daimler, Morgan Stanley, GM. They’re backed by a growing body of academic and blue-sky commercial research that, in hype if not hard evidence, claims that within a decade or two — or three — the world of transportation will be transported to another world.
Eye- popping descriptions portray commuters effortlessly summoning a vehicle from home. The car arrives at the door, driver-free, picks up the commuter and sails off downtown, through flows of other autonomous vehicles, guided by inter-car sensors or GPS and other readings of the environment. The only trick these cars can’t perform is floating like a Star Wars land speeder.
It is certainly presumptuous and possible massively wrongheaded to argue against the combined forces of corporate and technological progress, backed by governments and planners, but there is plenty of reason to be concerned about the driverless promotional machine.
Assuming the vast range of seemingly improbable practical issues can be resolved, technology is only one part of the promised driverless miracle that will not happen without a total reconstruction of transportation infrastructures. While the technological promise is liberation, the political and economic case for driverlessness suggests something else.
It’s not hard to notice that the driverless car is portrayed as a means to achieve an array of public policy goals — with little relevance to individual freedom. The choices that we want to make in how we meet our own transportation needs is already being washed away in the flood of public-policy imperatives.
One of the persistent conclusions in the driverless universe is the likely need to eliminate individual drivers and personal car ownership entirely. Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla electric-car company, said last year that car ownership might have to be outlawed. “It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two- ton death machine,” he said. Already one of the biggest policy selling points for driverlessness is increased safety and reduced costs to society for roads, insurance and health care.
The chief planner for the City of Toronto, Jennifer Keesmaat, recently agreed with a CBC reporter that the world we are heading to is one with “no personal ownership of cars.” Said Keesmaat: “I think you are just not going to need them.” Officials in Helsinki, Finland, have already said they plan to make vehicle ownership pointless.
But if there’s no personal car ownership, then the driverless car regime becomes essentially a collective one controlled by government — or by government- licensed corporations. In other words, we’ll all be captives to a glorified model of public transit.
As decades of experience shows, public transportation tends to be a fiasco in most jurisdictions. Billions are spent, through government control and monopolies, to achieve goals that often leave individual wants, needs and priorities abandoned at the side of the road. The objectives are public-policy objectives and infrastructure building — not individual transportation choices.
Some mistakenly think the automated future will look a lot like Uber, only without a driver. But driverless cars require more than a mobile app and a GPS system. They’ll require a totally revamped physical transportation infrastructure, staggering technological breakthroughs, and the end of individual control over personal transport. As with all utopian schemes, it will come bearing big- government policy interventions and con- trol that require major economic policy justifications and macro- economic analysis to justify action.
The macro- policy claims are already circulating. A typical contribution is an influential 2013 Morgan Stanley report that hyperventilated through a catalogue of high- level macro- benefits that would result from a U.S. national transport regime based on driverless technology. “No longer just the realm of science fiction, they (automated cars) are real and they will be on the roads sooner than you think,” said the report. The benefits, however, are the kind prioritized by government planners and hucksters looking for government backing.
Here’s a sample: “Autonomous cars bring obvious social benefits — fewer ( if any) road accidents, reduced traffic congestion, higher occupant productivity, fuel savings, and many, many more. However … autonomous vehicles need to generate a real economic return for both the consumers paying for the technology as well as the industry/governments that will invest billions developing it. “
The benefits to “society” range from trillion- dollar savings to more efficient parking lots. Morgan Stanley worked out some staggering statistical outcomes, the kind that dazzle politicians and bureaucrats. Overall, U.S. savings could top $1.3 trillion a year. Globally, the number is $5.6 trillion. More mundanely, a consultant at McKinsey & Co. reportedly concluded that “since self- driving cars could drop off passengers and then park themselves, parking spaces wouldn’t need to be wide enough to allow doors to open. That could free up 6.8 billion square yards in the U. S. that is currently being used for parking lots.” In case you’re wondering, that would be eight trillion square inches.
A 2015 Conference Board of Canada report ( adopting the Morgan Stanley model) estimated that Canada could save $65 billion a year in collision costs, time saved, fuel consumption and congestion avoidance if cars were autonomous. And that’s before the climate-change benefits, safety and the freed-up land in urban centres, noted by the report.
Not surprisingly, unleashing all these benefits requires big government to take up the cause. But the Conference Board report lamented that Canada is already falling behind on the future and issued a “clarion call” for action. “Governments at all levels must quickly start to plan for the arrival of AVs (autonomous vehicles), especially with large- scale infrastructure projects.” New laws and or regulations will have to be passed, and quickly.
Is there a consumer market for driverless vehicles? So far, if you go by the polls, the public still seems skeptical. But what does that matter, when there’s a rapidly expanding market among promoters of a big-brotherly push for a new industrial strategy. No drivers required.
CAPTIVES TO A GLORIFIED MODEL OF PUBLIC TRANSIT.