In recent decades, cars have been undergoing a gradual transformation from the kinds of mechanical systems Henry Ford might have imagined into computers on wheels. And that transformation is bringing with it a new wave of digital advances—above all, autonomous driving.
The first autonomous (or self-driving) cars date back to the late
twentieth century. But recent increases in sophistication and reductions
in cost—reflected, for example, in cheap LIDAR systems, which can “see”
a street in 3D in a way similar to that of the human eye—are now
bringing driverless cars closer to the market.
As we saw last week, several manufacturers are working
toward integrating such systems into their fleets, and expect to start
selling premium cars with different degrees of autonomy as early as
2016. According to a just-released IHS report, “sometime after 2050”
virtually all vehicles on the road might be self-driving.
But what is the drive behind self-driving cars? Are there
meaningful benefits beyond the convenience of keeping your hands off the steering wheel and thus being able to read a book, take a nap, or
guiltlessly text?
At the CES, journalists were busy snapping pictures of
driverless vehicles zooming through the streets of Vegas. But, had they
turned their cameras around, they might have captured something far more
interesting: the stage upon which the drama of self-driving will take
place—the street itself.
Self-driving vehicles promise to have a dramatic impact
on urban life, because they will blur the distinction between private
and public modes of transportation. “Your” car could give you a lift to
work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot,
give a lift to someone else in your family – or, for that matter, to
anyone else in your neighbourhood, social-media community, or city.
A recent paper by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s SMART Future Mobility team shows that the mobility demand
of a city like Singapore—potentially host to the world’s first
publicly-accessible feet of self-driving cars—could be met with 30% of
its existing vehicles. Furthermore, other researchers in the same group
suggest that this number could be cut by another 40% if passengers
travelling similar routes at the same time were willing to share a
vehicle—an estimate supported by an analysis of New York City Taxis
shareability networks. This implies a city in which everyone can travel
on demand with just one-fifth of the number of cars in use today.
Such reductions in car numbers would dramatically lower
the cost of our mobility infrastructure and the embodied energy
associated with building and maintaining it. Fewer cars may also mean
shorter travel times, less congestion, and a smaller environmental
impact.
The deployment of more intelligent transportation systems
promises to deliver similar benefits. Real-time data planning and smart
routing are already a reality. Tomorrow’s autonomous vehicles will
prompt another wave of innovation, from optimization of road capacity to
intersection management. Imagine a world without traffic lights, where
vehicular flows “magically” pass through one another and avoid
collision.
But, while the world’s mobility challenges will
increasingly be met with silicon rather than asphalt, encouraging
widespread adoption requires guaranteeing that our streets are as
safe—or safer—than they are today. That means that various redundancies
must be introduced to ensure that if one component fails, another
seamlessly takes over.
Traffic accidents, though rarer, would still be a
possibility; in fact, they might be one of the main impediments to
implementation of autonomous systems, demanding a restructuring of
insurance and liability that could sustain armies of lawyers for years
to come.
Finally, there is the fresh issue of digital security. We
are all familiar with viruses crashing our computers. But what if the
same virus crashes our cars?
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