Self-driving cars’ sunny future faces some cloudy days

Automotive heads talk autonomous vehicles’ ethical issues, mapping needs at SXSW Interactive

AUSTIN, TEXAS— The cruise to autonomous transportation is alive, but first we’ve got to get past some roadblocks. That’s the takeaway from SXSW Interactive, the tech portion of the Texas confab that wrapped earlier this week and once again drew engineers, executives and lawmakers focused on steering society through a mobility revolution.

While there remains a general feeling of technological inevitability about self-driving vehicles, industry experts remain concerned about the shift’s looming logistical, legal and social ramifications.

“The vehicles will be ready by 2021, but will society?” said Bill Ford, chair of Ford Motor Company, which, along with a number of other automakers and tech companies, have set roughly that date for the unveiling of a commercially viable self-driving car.

Interviews and SXSW lectures put a spotlight on a few big hurdles, which ranged from programming machines to have a heart to asking politicians to find consensus.

Ford said those building the transportation of the future need to look at “the ethics of autonomy,” which includes how they direct vehicles to act in an emergency.

“Who does the car hit? Does the car try to save me?” he said. “And what happens if (car companies) made different decisions about that?”

“This is like the Internet’s early days, in that many well-intentioned companies will not survive because you need scale.”

EDZARD OVERBEEK CEO OF HERE, ON THE RACE TO BUILD MAPS FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS

Dieter Zetsche, chairperson of Daimler, raised the same question in his speech but added that these were philosophical questions that shouldn’t just be discussed among engineers.

“These are questions for society at large and we have to find general ethical agreements,” he said. “But we shouldn’t overstress this. It will be extremely unlikely these vehicles would have to weigh this dilemma often.”

More than one million people die each year from traffic accidents. Autonomous car advocates argue the tech will drive that number down drastically.

Still, Ford warns, public reaction in the face of “high-profile accidents” could cause consumers to lose faith in a tech that is eating up billions of dollars in research and development.

Many cars on the road now, from Audis to Teslas, feature a range of camera, radar and laser sensors that provide driver-assist features, from lane-keeping to self-parking.

But those sensors rely heavily on well-marked roads and good weather, which is why so-called high-definition maps that provide digital scans of the world must make big strides to enable fully autonomous cars and trucks.

“This is not easy stuff. Rendering one building in a point cloud represents terabytes of data,” said Edzard Overbeek, CEO of HERE, a Berlinbased mapping company owned by Daimler, Audi and Mercedes-Benz that has partnerships with companies such as Nvidia and Intel-owned Mobileye. HERE has 400 vehicles out mapping roads around the world, but it also processes data coming off sensors currently installed in millions of cars.

The idea is that such geographical data can be crowdsourced and updated in real time.

If a car ahead of you has just skidded on a patch of ice, that information would be relayed to both you and your vehicle.

The competition in this space is intense. Alphabet’s Waymo has Google Maps. If Apple is indeed working on self-driving cars, it has its own mapping team.

Uber has made hires to build out a mapping division. It remains to be seen if the result will be collaboration or chaos.

“This is like the Internet’s early days, in that many well-intentioned companies will not survive because you need scale,” says Overbeek, whose company’s mapping system currently is in a majority of vehicles.

“The competition will keep everyone on their toes.” Most autonomous-car experts agree that if a brand-new city were created tomorrow, it would be easy to create a mobility system filled with robotic vehicles packed with powerful vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) sensors.

But the reality is far messier and includes the planet’s wide array of road conditions and human beings’ divergent views on how soon we need this tech.

Crumbling infrastructures plague modern cities such as Los Angeles, while traffic chaos envelopes developing capitals such as New Delhi. Both would give computer-programmed machines a big headache.

The artificial intelligence needed to power autonomous cars “has to advance a lot to cope with non-rulebased situations,” said Padmasree Warrior, CEO of Chinese-based car company NIO, which used SXSW to show off a sleek self-driving car it plans to roll out in 2020.

While it’s fun to look at cars that tap into our sci-fi dreams, less fanciful engineering projects seems inherently more realistic.

For example, automotive supplier Bosch is busy piloting a parking solution program with Mercedes in Stuttgart, Germany.

Using existing front and rear bumper parking sensors to scan for empty curbside spots as cars pass them, Bosch is looking to create a system that could sending updated spot availability to a driver’s infotainment system.

“In the next few years, you’re going to see more parking solutions offered up than complex freeway autopilot systems,” says Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch North America.

“We are a ways off from all-weather, all-condition autopilot.”