Resist the Coming Driverless Dystopia!

FORMER GM head of product development Bob Lutz and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance Chairman Carlos Ghosn recently outlined competing visions for transportation. Lutz’s is a merciless dystopia of automated pods run by huge corporations. In Ghosn’s, alternative forms of transportation don’t kill car ownership but complement it. Technological progress is often described in terms of inevitability. This is still a human world, however, and progress is what humans decide it is. Both perspectives — Lutz’s and Ghosn’s — are based on human choices. We need to think about them now, before they actually have to be made.

Lutz wrote in Automotive News that in 15 to 20 years, “human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.”

“The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous,” he wrote. “Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.” Once that happens, only a minority of people will want to buy their own self-driving vehicles, clinging nostalgically to the feeling of autonomy a car confers.

But most transportation will be handled by companies such as Uber and Amazon, which will acquire big fleets of autonomous “modules” that people will summon to carry them someplace or deliver stuff. These modules will move extremely fast and extremely close to one another on highways, unhindered by dangerous human drivers.

This means, Lutz wrote, car dealers would go extinct and volume carmakers — the only relevant ones — will either turn into trans- portation providers or become the equivalent of today’s contract manufacturers of mobile handsets, brandless and left at the mercy of fleet owners.

The human choice in this scenario isn’t made by consumers but by legislators deciding to ban humans from public roads. That may sound implausible, but there are already signs that regulators are embracing self-driving vehicles faster than expected.

Driverless Chrysler Pacificas by Alphabet subsidiary Waymo already ply the streets of Chandler, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix. It seems the people in charge of making transportation safer are buying the tech companies’ argument that self-driving vehicles only get into accidents because other cars are driven by humans.

It’s too early to accept these claims. According to a 2016 Rand Corporation report, Americans have about 1.09 crash fatalities per 100 million miles driven. “Fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries,” the report said.

The current small fleets of selfdriving vehicles would need to stay on the road continuously for hun- dreds of years to produce useful statistics. Last month’s safety report by Waymo says its cars have driven 3.5 million miles on “real-world roads” in eight years (and of course these real-world roads are like the wide, well-marked streets of Chandler, where it never snows and there are 299 sunny days per year).

As with most innovations, tech companies will push their irrelevant statistics at regulators with large lobbying budgets and exhortations to keep up with progress and support innovation. In the US, it’s conceivable the government will give up without much of a fight and only start thinking seri- ously about regulation when it’s too late.

But in Ghosn’s vision, regulationdriven change doesn’t obliterate consumer choice.

“A lot of people think this is substitution,” he said Wednesday at a conference in New York. “It’s not — it’s addition.”

Ghosn is an autonomous-driving enthusiast. Like the tech boosters, he believes that self-driving cars will be safer than human-driven ones. But his vision is about alleviating the stress of driving for private-car owners rather than taking away their ability to drive.

Is Ghosn too timid in his vision? As far as I’m concerned, he’s just advocating more choice. Today, one can own a car (and drive it) to have the full control many people like, even if it entails certain risks. One can also use car-sharing services or use an app to hail a ride — not in a driverless “module” yet, but that’s probably coming eventually. One can also opt for public transportation or ride a bicycle.

This is a setup we consumers must push regulators to preserve. It would be a shame to end up in Lutz’s world of huge, faceless fleets simply because we’ve given regulators too much power.

This is still a human world ... progress is what humans decide it is.