Self-driving cars almost ready — are you?
The cruise to autonoAUSTIN mous 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 Tuesday 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, chairman of Ford Motor, 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?”
Dieter Zetsche, chairman 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 30,000 people die each year from traffic accidents in the U.S., and more than a million globally.
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 today, 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 Berlin-based 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 also processes data coming off sensors currently installed in millions of cars.
“This is like the Internet’s early days, in that many well-intentioned companies will not survive because you need scale,” Overbeek says.
“The competition will keep everyone on their toes.”
As SXSW Interactive wraps up, questions loom about the ramifications of autonomous vehicles
Interviews and SXSW lectures put a spotlight on a few big hurdles.