Your Robot Car Should Ignore You
In 2014, Google fired a shot heard all the way to Detroit. Google’s newest driverless car prototype had no steering wheel and no brakes. The message was clear: Cars of the future will be born fully autonomous, with no human driver needed or desired. Even more jarring, rather than retrofit a Prius or a Lexus as Google did to build its previous two generations of driverless cars, the company custom-built the body of its youngest driverless car with a team of subcontracted automotive suppliers. Best of all, the car emerged from the womb already an expert driver, with roughly 700,000 miles of experience culled from the brains of previous prototypes. Now that Google’s self-driving cars have had another few more years of practice, the fleet’s collective drive-time equals more than 1.3 million miles, the equivalent of a human logging 15,000 miles a year behind the wheel for 90 years.
In response, car companies are pouring billions of dollars into software development and the epicenter of automotive innovation has moved from Detroit to Silicon Valley. If the car companies had the power to define the transition to driverless cars, they’d favor a very gradual process. Stage 1 would involve refining driver-assist technologies. Stage 2 would involve implementing a few high-end models with limited autonomous capability in specific situations, most likely on highways. In Stage 3, limited autonomous capacity would trickle down to cheaper car models.
Humans and robots should not take turns at the wheel.
Consulting firm Deloitte describes such a gradual approach as one that’s incremental, “in which automakers invest in new technologies—e.g., antilock brakes, electronic stability control, backup cameras, and telematics—across higher-end vehicle lines and then move down market as scale economics take hold.” Such a cautious approach, although appealing to an industry incumbent, may actually be unwise. For car companies, inching closer toward autonomy by gradually adding computer-guided safety technologies to help human drivers steer, brake, and accelerate could prove to be an unsafe strategy in the long run, both in terms of human life and for car industry bottom lines.
One reason car companies favor an incremental approach is that it prolongs their control over the automotive industry. Driverless cars need an intelligent on-board operating system that can perceive
