How many of you long for the day of the iceman delivering the valuable service we needed to keep our food fresh in the icebox? How about the rabbit-ear antennae for your television? The hand-crank washing machine? The rotary dial phone?
Anyone?
This coming April, I will take my son to the Secretary of State facility near my home for his driving test and his driver's license. He will be the third of my four children to pass this rite....and I hope he only needs it to get into bars in a couple of years. And I hope that my now three-year-old daughter never has to do it. The era of the driverless car is rapidly approaching, and as long as we do not mess it up, it will be a marked improvement over today.
Nissan announced today that it plans to have an "autonomous driving system" available across multiple cars in its fleet by 2020. This ups the ante on Audi and Toyota who have both started development of driverless cars, but have made no formal commitment to when and how many. Nissan previously promised a zero-emissions car by 2010, and delivered the Leaf as an all-electric option. The track record suggests that they will deliver, and with Google developing technology for its use in maintaining its Street View, expect more auto makers to follow.
The only thing that can derail this bright future is our own desire to have the freedom to break the law and do stupid stuff.
The driverless car can deliver fewer accidents, and will eliminate those accidents caused by distracted driving completely. The driverless car will render DUI/DWI convictions a thing of the past, and the fatalities from DUI/DWI non-existent. Traffic jams will decline sharply. Road rage will go the way of the Wild West. With advancing technology in vehicle design, matched with the optimization of electricity storage and delivery systems, these cars will drive smarter and more fuel efficiently, blowing away the 54 MPG CAFE standard currently targeted for 2025. (Current human-driven electric vehicles get an equivalent of 119 MPG.) We will eliminate almost 40,000 deaths per year, decrease the stress on millions of drivers, and improve air quality.
Yet, there will be those with loud voices trying to stop the government from taking away their freedom.
This is not driven by the government, though, and it really is not taking away our freedom. Insurance companies and consumers are pushing for it. The technology is there and available. Yes, we will no longer be able to choose to speed when we are late. We will no longer be able to chase after that person that cut us off. We will no longer be able to cut the wrong way down a one-way street to avoid traffic. But the question is, does taking away the freedom to do something dangerous, and that threatens the life of another, really taking away freedom. What about the gained freedom of families who will never have to worry about a loved one dying in a DUI/DWI accident, or those families who will never lose another loved one to jail time for those accidents? What about the freedom to read the paper, be entertained, or talk to friends (safely!) while riding in our car? What about the additional time we get back from reduced traffic jams? What about the freedom to shift money from car insurance payments to something that adds value to our lives? The development of technology always carries tradeoffs, but in this case the lives saved, freedoms gained, and economic value delivered more than offset the freedoms lost.
Someone will raise the alarm that the technology necessary to truly allow driverless cars to function will make us targets for computer espionage whereby a teenager with a good smartphone could hijack our car. There is no question that the development of the technology will require several safeguards on the communication systems that predict and avoid accidents. But it's been 23 years since Col. Stuart took over a plane's navigation system in Die Hard 2, and even the most well-funded terrorist networks in the world have yet to duplicate that feat. Taking control of a driverless car's control system will be the most expensive way to make an attempt on someone's life.
The move to the driverless car is too many years in the waiting, and by 2030, we will wonder how we ever tolerated vehicles we had to drive all day. We will entertain ourselves by going to a local roadway open specifically to human-driven vehicles and whet our appetite for those good ole days every once in a while (I personally will love to get behind the wheel of a manual Mini Cooper and drive it around for an hour or two). We may even get to the point where we tire of having the car sitting in the driveway wasting our money and buy the car as a service when we need it instead of paying to have it average less than the speed of a bicycle (given all the time it spends parked). That will further reduce the cost to us, and the space we need to occupy.
We sit on the cusp of this great revolution in transportation...if we are smart enough to embrace it.
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