Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars
At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker.
Last Friday, Tesla’s Model Trio, the upstart automaker’s very first mid-priced, mass-market electrical vehicle, began rolling off the assembly line. The Model 3’s price (around thirty-five thousand dollars), its range before needing to recharge (about two hundred and fifteen miles), and relatively inexpensive, high-performance battery pack have received a superb deal of attention. But other automakers are increasingly more interested in another aspect of the Model Three: a self-driving system called Autopilot that, according to Tesla, uses cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to see through rain and fog, set speed based on traffic conditions, stay in a lane, pass slow-moving vehicles, exit freeways, and park without driver input. Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, predicted recently that in about two years people will be able to go to sleep in a moving Tesla and wake up to find they have arrived at their destination.
Traditional automakers have been dabbling in self-driving research for about two years, but with little urgency. Lately, however, attitudes have shifted dramatically. All of a sudden, the prospect of autonomous vehicles looms as a tangible threat to traditional cars, and auto companies are plowing ahead with driverless experimentation, worried that if they don’t they’ll be left behind. That fear is behind a flurry of latest activity. Last year, General Motors purchased Cruise Automation, a self-driving software company, for about a billion dollars, and invested five hundred million dollars in Lyft, the rail service, to create an autonomous vehicle network. At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker. Nissan has joined coerces with NASA ’s Ames Research Center to develop terrestrial and space-ready driving machines that can navigate elaborate terrains with no human input, slated to be commercially available by around 2020, toughly the same year that Fiat Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, and Ford plan to launch their driverless vehicles. Ford opened an R. & D. center in Palo Alto in two thousand fifteen and, subsequently, established a Clever Mobility unit. Skittishness about the imminent influence of autonomous cars was one reason that the Ford C.E.O. Mark Fields lost his job, in May. Ford’s stock price had fallen but, more significant, Bill Ford had become impatient with the slow progress of his company’s self-driving car project. The fresh C.E.O., Jim Hackett, had been the very first head of the company’s Wise Mobility unit.
What switched? Put simply, Silicon Valley discovered Detroit. Pursuing fresh revenue flows outside of their usual markets, firms like Google, Apple, and Uber, along with well-heeled venture capitalists, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into partnerships and internal design teams to produce hardware and software for self-driving electrified cars. It was a natural fit, a by-product of the advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence that tech companies were already focussed on.
These investments linked previously unrelated businesses. Apple invested a billion dollars in the Chinese ride-sharing rigid Didi Chuxing, mainly to amass a database of skill about vehicle and driving maneuvers on busy streets. Uber also took a stake in Didi Chuxing, while Google invested in Lyft. The chipmaker Nvidia teamed up with the German mapping company Here to develop A.I.-based G.P.S. systems for driverless cars. And, in the fattest deal, a few months ago, Intel paid fifteen billion dollars for Mobileye, an Israeli maker of digital-vision systems for navigating complicated traffic environments.
All told, a few dozen partnerships and startups involving autonomous vehicles surfaced in just the past duo of years—a wave of activity involving the auto industry that is astonishing to veteran observers. As Doug Newcomb, a longtime auto journalist and now the president of C3, a Web site loyal to car technology, told me, “Auto companies are conservative; they weren’t ready for this onslaught of outsiders at very first. What industry would be? This never happens.”
Sacrificing profits in the brief term, Silicon Valley firms are jockeying for position to provide the very first peeks of what the future of automobiles and transportation could be. (The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that, by 2035, autos with autonomous vehicle features will capture twenty-five per cent of the fresh car market.) Uber’s Otto unit made news not long ago when its driverless truck covered a hundred and twenty miles in Colorado, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, to drop off two thousand cases of Budweiser at a warehouse. The semi stood out on the highway with its nosey sign : “Proudly Brewed. Self-Driven.” Google has fielded a fleet of some seven hundred self-driving vehicles, including Lexus S.U.V.s, Chrysler Pacific minivans, and a custom-built, bubble-shaped design oddity called Firefly. Since Google began its autonomous vehicle skunkworks, in 2009, its cars (now managed by a subsidiary called Waymo) have driven more than three million miles on public roads in California, Texas, Arizona, and Washington.
The magnitude of the technology investments has created a quandary for traditional automobile companies. They could cede a seemingly soon-to-be lucrative portion of their industry to Silicon Valley, essentially serving as subcontractors to the likes of Apple and Google, making shells of cars while the technology companies add their own sensors and software. That would leave the automakers with minimal profits from each vehicle, no residual revenue from, say, maintenance and service, and diminishing relationships with car buyers, their natural customer base. Or they could do the opposite—that is, treat the technology companies as suppliers and learn how to build autonomous cars themselves. They chose the latter.
One utopian vision of the future—one not necessarily collective by automakers—is that self-driving vehicles will ultimately lead to the elimination of individual car ownership. In this perspective, cities are emptied of traditional vehicles, while automated cars wander the streets twenty-four hours a day, on call via the cloud for anyone wanting a rail to the supermarket or the airport. Every shopping mall, airport, and school district would be navigated by self-driving shuttles.
If you believe this landscape is possible, then the economic rationale for purchasing an automobile falls apart. One prominent report , by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, found that using an automated-mobility service—similar to Uber and Lyft but driverless—would cost consumers about the same as wielding and operating a sedan, less than a dollar per mile, with none of the headaches of maintenance, parking, and battling traffic in a bad commute. A 2nd examine , by technology analysts RethinkX, argued that autonomous vehicles “will end the model of car ownership itself.” By 2030, the group said, ninety-five per cent of all U.S. passenger miles will be served by self-driving fleets—from two seaters to eighteen wheelers—and the average American family will save five thousand and six hundred dollars per year in transportation costs. The implication of these studies is that the car companies today are spending, in many cases, more than one-fifth of their R. & D. budgets to help ideal technology that could mostly put them out of business.
There are a number of obstacles to this screenplay, the thickest of which might be that car companies are in business to make profits and will do their best to insure they maintain their sales market. There are also technological hurdles to a entirely driverless world. The driverless car that is fully capable of taking itself anywhere, never needs human assistance, and has no controls for people to operate does not yet exist. The machine cognition needed to calculate how to navigate a road with one lane blocked by an emergency vehicle and a flagman intermittently swinging cars through is well beyond anything invented today. In fact, most self-driving cars are afraid to leave their lane and, thus, can lightly hiccup in stop-and-go mode behind a mail truck for miles—and a four-way stop sign can lead to paralysis.
It will take some doing to get to the point where cars don’t need drivers, but safety experts are hoping for that outcome quickly. The number of highway deaths has risen distressingly in the last few years, to about forty thousand in the U.S. and well over a million worldwide—and as many as ninety-six per cent of these fatalities are the result of driver mistakes. Frustrated by not being able to put a dent in these statistics, the National Highway and Safety Administration, in September, issued detailed guidelines for testing and deploying autonomous vehicles and, at the same time, endorsed self-driving cars as a way to “dramatically decrease the number of crashes tied to human choices and behavior.” Still, that holds only if the human is never trusted with the wheel. In a number of studies, carmakers have found that people in self-driving vehicles are inadequate backup drivers—unable to quickly judge situations around them when called upon to drive abruptly, pulled away from a distraction like a cell phone, movie game, or streaming movie. In other words, given our propensity for road rage and our inability to overlook the allure of a text message, maybe the smartest thing we could do is put our lives in the arms of dispassionate machines. At least, that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on.
Jeffrey Rothfeder is a former editor-in-chief of the International Business Times and a former national news editor at Bloomberg News. His latest book is “Driving Honda: Inwards the World’s Most Innovative Car Company.”
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars, The Fresh Yorker
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars
At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker.
Last Friday, Tesla’s Model Three, the upstart automaker’s very first mid-priced, mass-market electrical vehicle, began rolling off the assembly line. The Model 3’s price (around thirty-five thousand dollars), its range before needing to recharge (about two hundred and fifteen miles), and relatively inexpensive, high-performance battery pack have received a good deal of attention. But other automakers are increasingly more interested in another aspect of the Model Trio: a self-driving system called Autopilot that, according to Tesla, uses cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to see through rain and fog, set speed based on traffic conditions, stay in a lane, pass slow-moving vehicles, exit freeways, and park without driver input. Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, predicted recently that in about two years people will be able to go to sleep in a moving Tesla and wake up to find they have arrived at their destination.
Traditional automakers have been dabbling in self-driving research for about two years, but with little urgency. Lately, tho’, attitudes have shifted dramatically. All of a sudden, the prospect of autonomous vehicles looms as a tangible threat to traditional cars, and auto companies are plowing ahead with driverless experimentation, worried that if they don’t they’ll be left behind. That fear is behind a flurry of latest activity. Last year, General Motors purchased Cruise Automation, a self-driving software company, for about a billion dollars, and invested five hundred million dollars in Lyft, the rail service, to create an autonomous vehicle network. At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker. Nissan has joined coerces with NASA ’s Ames Research Center to develop terrestrial and space-ready driving machines that can navigate elaborate terrains with no human input, slated to be commercially available by around 2020, harshly the same year that Fiat Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, and Ford plan to launch their driverless vehicles. Ford opened an R. & D. center in Palo Alto in two thousand fifteen and, subsequently, established a Wise Mobility unit. Skittishness about the imminent influence of autonomous cars was one reason that the Ford C.E.O. Mark Fields lost his job, in May. Ford’s stock price had fallen but, more significant, Bill Ford had become impatient with the slow progress of his company’s self-driving car project. The fresh C.E.O., Jim Hackett, had been the very first head of the company’s Clever Mobility unit.
What switched? Put simply, Silicon Valley discovered Detroit. Pursuing fresh revenue flows outside of their usual markets, firms like Google, Apple, and Uber, along with well-heeled venture capitalists, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into partnerships and internal design teams to produce hardware and software for self-driving electrified cars. It was a natural fit, a by-product of the advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence that tech companies were already focussed on.
These investments linked previously unrelated businesses. Apple invested a billion dollars in the Chinese ride-sharing rigid Didi Chuxing, mainly to amass a database of skill about vehicle and driving maneuvers on busy streets. Uber also took a stake in Didi Chuxing, while Google invested in Lyft. The chipmaker Nvidia teamed up with the German mapping company Here to develop A.I.-based G.P.S. systems for driverless cars. And, in the fattest deal, a few months ago, Intel paid fifteen billion dollars for Mobileye, an Israeli maker of digital-vision systems for navigating complicated traffic environments.
All told, a few dozen partnerships and startups involving autonomous vehicles surfaced in just the past duo of years—a wave of activity involving the auto industry that is astonishing to veteran observers. As Doug Newcomb, a longtime auto journalist and now the president of C3, a Web site loyal to car technology, told me, “Auto companies are conservative; they weren’t ready for this onslaught of outsiders at very first. What industry would be? This never happens.”
Sacrificing profits in the brief term, Silicon Valley firms are jockeying for position to provide the very first peeks of what the future of automobiles and transportation could be. (The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that, by 2035, autos with autonomous vehicle features will capture twenty-five per cent of the fresh car market.) Uber’s Otto unit made news not long ago when its driverless truck covered a hundred and twenty miles in Colorado, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, to drop off two thousand cases of Budweiser at a warehouse. The semi stood out on the highway with its nosey sign : “Proudly Brewed. Self-Driven.” Google has fielded a fleet of some seven hundred self-driving vehicles, including Lexus S.U.V.s, Chrysler Pacific minivans, and a custom-built, bubble-shaped design oddity called Firefly. Since Google began its autonomous vehicle skunkworks, in 2009, its cars (now managed by a subsidiary called Waymo) have driven more than three million miles on public roads in California, Texas, Arizona, and Washington.
The magnitude of the technology investments has created a quandary for traditional automobile companies. They could cede a seemingly soon-to-be lucrative portion of their industry to Silicon Valley, essentially serving as subcontractors to the likes of Apple and Google, making shells of cars while the technology companies add their own sensors and software. That would leave the automakers with minimal profits from each vehicle, no residual revenue from, say, maintenance and service, and diminishing relationships with car buyers, their natural customer base. Or they could do the opposite—that is, treat the technology companies as suppliers and learn how to build autonomous cars themselves. They chose the latter.
One utopian vision of the future—one not necessarily collective by automakers—is that self-driving vehicles will ultimately lead to the elimination of individual car ownership. In this perspective, cities are emptied of traditional vehicles, while automated cars wander the streets twenty-four hours a day, on call via the cloud for anyone wanting a rail to the supermarket or the airport. Every shopping mall, airport, and school district would be navigated by self-driving shuttles.
If you believe this landscape is possible, then the economic rationale for purchasing an automobile falls apart. One prominent report , by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, found that using an automated-mobility service—similar to Uber and Lyft but driverless—would cost consumers about the same as possessing and operating a sedan, less than a dollar per mile, with none of the headaches of maintenance, parking, and battling traffic in a bad commute. A 2nd explore , by technology analysts RethinkX, argued that autonomous vehicles “will end the model of car ownership itself.” By 2030, the group said, ninety-five per cent of all U.S. passenger miles will be served by self-driving fleets—from two seaters to eighteen wheelers—and the average American family will save five thousand and six hundred dollars per year in transportation costs. The implication of these studies is that the car companies today are spending, in many cases, more than one-fifth of their R. & D. budgets to help flawless technology that could mostly put them out of business.
There are a number of obstacles to this screenplay, the largest of which might be that car companies are in business to make profits and will do their best to insure they maintain their sales market. There are also technological hurdles to a entirely driverless world. The driverless car that is fully capable of taking itself anywhere, never needs human assistance, and has no controls for people to operate does not yet exist. The machine cognition needed to calculate how to navigate a road with one lane blocked by an emergency vehicle and a flagman intermittently flapping cars through is well beyond anything invented today. In fact, most self-driving cars are afraid to leave their lane and, thus, can lightly hiccup in stop-and-go mode behind a mail truck for miles—and a four-way stop sign can lead to paralysis.
It will take some doing to get to the point where cars don’t need drivers, but safety experts are hoping for that outcome quickly. The number of highway deaths has risen distressingly in the last few years, to about forty thousand in the U.S. and well over a million worldwide—and as many as ninety-six per cent of these fatalities are the result of driver mistakes. Frustrated by not being able to put a dent in these statistics, the National Highway and Safety Administration, in September, issued detailed guidelines for testing and deploying autonomous vehicles and, at the same time, endorsed self-driving cars as a way to “dramatically decrease the number of crashes tied to human choices and behavior.” Still, that holds only if the human is never trusted with the wheel. In a number of studies, carmakers have found that people in self-driving vehicles are inadequate backup drivers—unable to quickly judge situations around them when called upon to drive abruptly, pulled away from a distraction like a cell phone, movie game, or streaming movie. In other words, given our propensity for road rage and our inability to overlook the allure of a text message, maybe the smartest thing we could do is put our lives in the palms of dispassionate machines. At least, that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on.
Jeffrey Rothfeder is a former editor-in-chief of the International Business Times and a former national news editor at Bloomberg News. His latest book is “Driving Honda: Inwards the World’s Most Innovative Car Company.”
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars, The Fresh Yorker
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars
At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker.
Last Friday, Tesla’s Model Trio, the upstart automaker’s very first mid-priced, mass-market electrical vehicle, began rolling off the assembly line. The Model 3’s price (around thirty-five thousand dollars), its range before needing to recharge (about two hundred and fifteen miles), and relatively inexpensive, high-performance battery pack have received a excellent deal of attention. But other automakers are increasingly more interested in another aspect of the Model Trio: a self-driving system called Autopilot that, according to Tesla, uses cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to see through rain and fog, set speed based on traffic conditions, stay in a lane, pass slow-moving vehicles, exit freeways, and park without driver input. Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, predicted recently that in about two years people will be able to go to sleep in a moving Tesla and wake up to find they have arrived at their destination.
Traditional automakers have been dabbling in self-driving research for about two years, but with little urgency. Lately, however, attitudes have shifted dramatically. All of a sudden, the prospect of autonomous vehicles looms as a tangible threat to traditional cars, and auto companies are plowing ahead with driverless experimentation, worried that if they don’t they’ll be left behind. That fear is behind a flurry of latest activity. Last year, General Motors purchased Cruise Automation, a self-driving software company, for about a billion dollars, and invested five hundred million dollars in Lyft, the rail service, to create an autonomous vehicle network. At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker. Nissan has joined compels with NASA ’s Ames Research Center to develop terrestrial and space-ready driving machines that can navigate complicated terrains with no human input, slated to be commercially available by around 2020, toughly the same year that Fiat Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, and Ford plan to launch their driverless vehicles. Ford opened an R. & D. center in Palo Alto in two thousand fifteen and, subsequently, established a Wise Mobility unit. Skittishness about the imminent influence of autonomous cars was one reason that the Ford C.E.O. Mark Fields lost his job, in May. Ford’s stock price had fallen but, more significant, Bill Ford had become impatient with the slow progress of his company’s self-driving car project. The fresh C.E.O., Jim Hackett, had been the very first head of the company’s Wise Mobility unit.
What switched? Put simply, Silicon Valley discovered Detroit. Pursuing fresh revenue flows outside of their usual markets, firms like Google, Apple, and Uber, along with well-heeled venture capitalists, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into partnerships and internal design teams to produce hardware and software for self-driving electrical cars. It was a natural fit, a by-product of the advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence that tech companies were already focussed on.
These investments linked previously unrelated businesses. Apple invested a billion dollars in the Chinese ride-sharing stiff Didi Chuxing, mainly to amass a database of skill about vehicle and driving maneuvers on busy streets. Uber also took a stake in Didi Chuxing, while Google invested in Lyft. The chipmaker Nvidia teamed up with the German mapping company Here to develop A.I.-based G.P.S. systems for driverless cars. And, in the largest deal, a few months ago, Intel paid fifteen billion dollars for Mobileye, an Israeli maker of digital-vision systems for navigating complicated traffic environments.
All told, a few dozen partnerships and startups involving autonomous vehicles surfaced in just the past duo of years—a wave of activity involving the auto industry that is astonishing to veteran observers. As Doug Newcomb, a longtime auto journalist and now the president of C3, a Web site loyal to car technology, told me, “Auto companies are conservative; they weren’t ready for this onslaught of outsiders at very first. What industry would be? This never happens.”
Sacrificing profits in the brief term, Silicon Valley firms are jockeying for position to provide the very first peeks of what the future of automobiles and transportation could be. (The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that, by 2035, autos with autonomous vehicle features will capture twenty-five per cent of the fresh car market.) Uber’s Otto unit made news not long ago when its driverless truck covered a hundred and twenty miles in Colorado, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, to drop off two thousand cases of Budweiser at a warehouse. The semi stood out on the highway with its nosey sign : “Proudly Brewed. Self-Driven.” Google has fielded a fleet of some seven hundred self-driving vehicles, including Lexus S.U.V.s, Chrysler Pacific minivans, and a custom-built, bubble-shaped design oddity called Firefly. Since Google began its autonomous vehicle skunkworks, in 2009, its cars (now managed by a subsidiary called Waymo) have driven more than three million miles on public roads in California, Texas, Arizona, and Washington.
The magnitude of the technology investments has created a quandary for traditional automobile companies. They could cede a seemingly soon-to-be lucrative portion of their industry to Silicon Valley, essentially serving as subcontractors to the likes of Apple and Google, making shells of cars while the technology companies add their own sensors and software. That would leave the automakers with minimal profits from each vehicle, no residual revenue from, say, maintenance and service, and diminishing relationships with car buyers, their natural customer base. Or they could do the opposite—that is, treat the technology companies as suppliers and learn how to build autonomous cars themselves. They chose the latter.
One utopian vision of the future—one not necessarily collective by automakers—is that self-driving vehicles will ultimately lead to the elimination of individual car ownership. In this perspective, cities are emptied of traditional vehicles, while automated cars wander the streets twenty-four hours a day, on call via the cloud for anyone wanting a rail to the supermarket or the airport. Every shopping mall, airport, and school district would be navigated by self-driving shuttles.
If you believe this landscape is possible, then the economic rationale for purchasing an automobile falls apart. One prominent report , by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, found that using an automated-mobility service—similar to Uber and Lyft but driverless—would cost consumers about the same as wielding and operating a sedan, less than a dollar per mile, with none of the headaches of maintenance, parking, and battling traffic in a bad commute. A 2nd examine , by technology analysts RethinkX, argued that autonomous vehicles “will end the model of car ownership itself.” By 2030, the group said, ninety-five per cent of all U.S. passenger miles will be served by self-driving fleets—from two seaters to eighteen wheelers—and the average American family will save five thousand and six hundred dollars per year in transportation costs. The implication of these studies is that the car companies today are spending, in many cases, more than one-fifth of their R. & D. budgets to help flawless technology that could mostly put them out of business.
There are a number of obstacles to this screenplay, the fattest of which might be that car companies are in business to make profits and will do their best to insure they maintain their sales market. There are also technological hurdles to a totally driverless world. The driverless car that is fully capable of taking itself anywhere, never needs human assistance, and has no controls for people to operate does not yet exist. The machine cognition needed to calculate how to navigate a road with one lane blocked by an emergency vehicle and a flagman intermittently flapping cars through is well beyond anything invented today. In fact, most self-driving cars are afraid to leave their lane and, thus, can lightly hiccup in stop-and-go mode behind a mail truck for miles—and a four-way stop sign can lead to paralysis.
It will take some doing to get to the point where cars don’t need drivers, but safety experts are hoping for that outcome quickly. The number of highway deaths has risen distressingly in the last few years, to about forty thousand in the U.S. and well over a million worldwide—and as many as ninety-six per cent of these fatalities are the result of driver mistakes. Frustrated by not being able to put a dent in these statistics, the National Highway and Safety Administration, in September, issued detailed guidelines for testing and deploying autonomous vehicles and, at the same time, endorsed self-driving cars as a way to “dramatically decrease the number of crashes tied to human choices and behavior.” Still, that holds only if the human is never trusted with the wheel. In a number of studies, carmakers have found that people in self-driving vehicles are inadequate backup drivers—unable to quickly judge situations around them when called upon to drive all of a sudden, pulled away from a distraction like a cell phone, movie game, or streaming movie. In other words, given our propensity for road rage and our inability to disregard the allure of a text message, maybe the smartest thing we could do is put our lives in the palms of dispassionate machines. At least, that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on.
Jeffrey Rothfeder is a former editor-in-chief of the International Business Times and a former national news editor at Bloomberg News. His latest book is “Driving Honda: Inwards the World’s Most Innovative Car Company.”
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars, The Fresh Yorker
Detroit’s Urgent Embrace of Self-Driving Cars
At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrified self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker.
Last Friday, Tesla’s Model Three, the upstart automaker’s very first mid-priced, mass-market electrified vehicle, began rolling off the assembly line. The Model 3’s price (around thirty-five thousand dollars), its range before needing to recharge (about two hundred and fifteen miles), and relatively inexpensive, high-performance battery pack have received a excellent deal of attention. But other automakers are increasingly more interested in another aspect of the Model Three: a self-driving system called Autopilot that, according to Tesla, uses cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to see through rain and fog, set speed based on traffic conditions, stay in a lane, pass slow-moving vehicles, exit freeways, and park without driver input. Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, predicted recently that in about two years people will be able to go to sleep in a moving Tesla and wake up to find they have arrived at their destination.
Traditional automakers have been dabbling in self-driving research for about two years, but with little urgency. Lately, tho’, attitudes have shifted dramatically. Abruptly, the prospect of autonomous vehicles looms as a tangible threat to traditional cars, and auto companies are plowing ahead with driverless experimentation, worried that if they don’t they’ll be left behind. That fear is behind a flurry of latest activity. Last year, General Motors purchased Cruise Automation, a self-driving software company, for about a billion dollars, and invested five hundred million dollars in Lyft, the rail service, to create an autonomous vehicle network. At last count, G.M. had already built almost two hundred Chevrolet Bolt electrical self-driving vehicles, the most of any automaker. Nissan has joined compels with NASA ’s Ames Research Center to develop terrestrial and space-ready driving machines that can navigate complicated terrains with no human input, slated to be commercially available by around 2020, harshly the same year that Fiat Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, and Ford plan to launch their driverless vehicles. Ford opened an R. & D. center in Palo Alto in two thousand fifteen and, subsequently, established a Brainy Mobility unit. Skittishness about the imminent influence of autonomous cars was one reason that the Ford C.E.O. Mark Fields lost his job, in May. Ford’s stock price had fallen but, more significant, Bill Ford had become impatient with the slow progress of his company’s self-driving car project. The fresh C.E.O., Jim Hackett, had been the very first head of the company’s Clever Mobility unit.
What switched? Put simply, Silicon Valley discovered Detroit. Pursuing fresh revenue flows outside of their usual markets, firms like Google, Apple, and Uber, along with well-heeled venture capitalists, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into partnerships and internal design teams to produce hardware and software for self-driving electrical cars. It was a natural fit, a by-product of the advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence that tech companies were already focussed on.
These investments linked previously unrelated businesses. Apple invested a billion dollars in the Chinese ride-sharing rigid Didi Chuxing, mainly to amass a database of skill about vehicle and driving maneuvers on busy streets. Uber also took a stake in Didi Chuxing, while Google invested in Lyft. The chipmaker Nvidia teamed up with the German mapping company Here to develop A.I.-based G.P.S. systems for driverless cars. And, in the thickest deal, a few months ago, Intel paid fifteen billion dollars for Mobileye, an Israeli maker of digital-vision systems for navigating elaborate traffic environments.
All told, a few dozen partnerships and startups involving autonomous vehicles surfaced in just the past duo of years—a wave of activity involving the auto industry that is astonishing to veteran observers. As Doug Newcomb, a longtime auto journalist and now the president of C3, a Web site faithful to car technology, told me, “Auto companies are conservative; they weren’t ready for this onslaught of outsiders at very first. What industry would be? This never happens.”
Sacrificing profits in the brief term, Silicon Valley firms are jockeying for position to provide the very first peeks of what the future of automobiles and transportation could be. (The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that, by 2035, autos with autonomous vehicle features will capture twenty-five per cent of the fresh car market.) Uber’s Otto unit made news not long ago when its driverless truck covered a hundred and twenty miles in Colorado, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, to drop off two thousand cases of Budweiser at a warehouse. The semi stood out on the highway with its nosey sign : “Proudly Brewed. Self-Driven.” Google has fielded a fleet of some seven hundred self-driving vehicles, including Lexus S.U.V.s, Chrysler Pacific minivans, and a custom-built, bubble-shaped design oddity called Firefly. Since Google began its autonomous vehicle skunkworks, in 2009, its cars (now managed by a subsidiary called Waymo) have driven more than three million miles on public roads in California, Texas, Arizona, and Washington.
The magnitude of the technology investments has created a quandary for traditional automobile companies. They could cede a seemingly soon-to-be lucrative portion of their industry to Silicon Valley, essentially serving as subcontractors to the likes of Apple and Google, making shells of cars while the technology companies add their own sensors and software. That would leave the automakers with minimal profits from each vehicle, no residual revenue from, say, maintenance and service, and diminishing relationships with car buyers, their natural customer base. Or they could do the opposite—that is, treat the technology companies as suppliers and learn how to build autonomous cars themselves. They chose the latter.
One utopian vision of the future—one not necessarily collective by automakers—is that self-driving vehicles will ultimately lead to the elimination of individual car ownership. In this perspective, cities are emptied of traditional vehicles, while automated cars wander the streets twenty-four hours a day, on call via the cloud for anyone wanting a rail to the supermarket or the airport. Every shopping mall, airport, and school district would be navigated by self-driving shuttles.
If you believe this landscape is possible, then the economic rationale for purchasing an automobile falls apart. One prominent report , by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, found that using an automated-mobility service—similar to Uber and Lyft but driverless—would cost consumers about the same as possessing and operating a sedan, less than a dollar per mile, with none of the headaches of maintenance, parking, and battling traffic in a bad commute. A 2nd explore , by technology analysts RethinkX, argued that autonomous vehicles “will end the model of car ownership itself.” By 2030, the group said, ninety-five per cent of all U.S. passenger miles will be served by self-driving fleets—from two seaters to eighteen wheelers—and the average American family will save five thousand and six hundred dollars per year in transportation costs. The implication of these studies is that the car companies today are spending, in many cases, more than one-fifth of their R. & D. budgets to help ideal technology that could mostly put them out of business.
There are a number of obstacles to this screenplay, the largest of which might be that car companies are in business to make profits and will do their best to insure they maintain their sales market. There are also technological hurdles to a fully driverless world. The driverless car that is fully capable of taking itself anywhere, never needs human assistance, and has no controls for people to operate does not yet exist. The machine cognition needed to calculate how to navigate a road with one lane blocked by an emergency vehicle and a flagman intermittently swinging cars through is well beyond anything invented today. In fact, most self-driving cars are afraid to leave their lane and, thus, can lightly hiccup in stop-and-go mode behind a mail truck for miles—and a four-way stop sign can lead to paralysis.
It will take some doing to get to the point where cars don’t need drivers, but safety experts are hoping for that outcome quickly. The number of highway deaths has risen distressingly in the last few years, to about forty thousand in the U.S. and well over a million worldwide—and as many as ninety-six per cent of these fatalities are the result of driver mistakes. Frustrated by not being able to put a dent in these statistics, the National Highway and Safety Administration, in September, issued detailed guidelines for testing and deploying autonomous vehicles and, at the same time, endorsed self-driving cars as a way to “dramatically decrease the number of crashes tied to human choices and behavior.” Still, that holds only if the human is never trusted with the wheel. In a number of studies, carmakers have found that people in self-driving vehicles are inadequate backup drivers—unable to quickly judge situations around them when called upon to drive all of a sudden, pulled away from a distraction like a cell phone, movie game, or streaming movie. In other words, given our propensity for road rage and our inability to overlook the allure of a text message, maybe the smartest thing we could do is put our lives in the mitts of dispassionate machines. At least, that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on.
Jeffrey Rothfeder is a former editor-in-chief of the International Business Times and a former national news editor at Bloomberg News. His latest book is “Driving Honda: Inwards the World’s Most Innovative Car Company.”