Driving towards driverless cars

Fads come and go. Last week it was 3D Printing that will change the world as we know it. Today it is driverless cars. Sorry to be an old fashioned curmudgeon, but dream on.

My prediction for the week? Fully automated vehicles capable of driving in every situation will not be here in most of our lifetimes. I know this will outrage the hyperventilating techies who see driverless cars transforming our lives within the decade — some are even talking about 2020 — but I stand my ground. You and I will likely be long dead before such changes happen.

Yes, I know Google cars have achieved lots. And I know many motor manufacturers are pouring significant millions of dollars into the creation of the driverless car. Uber for example just stripped 40 top robotics researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s highly-regarded robotics department. As David Pogue, anchor columnist for Yahoo Tech, noted in the latest Scientific American: “This is exciting stuff. Self-driving cars, in theory, could eliminate the crashes that kill 1.2 million people every year around the world. Trillions of dollars would never have to be spent on hospital stays and insurance payouts.”

But flick a few pages forward in the same Scientific American June edition, and a more sober prognosis for the driverless car emerges: “Soon electronic chauffeurs will take us wherever we want to go, whenever we want, in complete safety — so long as we do not need to make any left turns across traffic. Changing road surfaces are a problem, so are snow and ice… And in an urban environment where pedestrians are likely to run out in front of a car, we should probably just walk or take the subway.”

In a ruthlessly realistic evaluation of our miraculous driverless future, Steven Shladover at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California has a sobering prediction: “Fully automated vehicles capable of driving in every situation will not be here until 2075. Could it happen sooner than that? Certainly. But not by much.” You might not be dead by then, but I almost certainly will be.

Of course, sooner rather than later all depends on what you define as self-driving cars. And here, Shladover says “increasingly unrealistic expectations” have arisen out of failures to distinguish between “autonomous,” “driverless” and self-driving” cars — and of failures to be exact about exactly what types of environment such vehicles might be able to operate in.