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CES 2008 Las Vegas Jan 7-10

What exercise defective ignition switches, shrapnel-spewing airbags, excessive diesel fuel emissions, and overstated fuel economic system ratings take in common? They all make automakers expect like companies you tin can't fully trust. It's going to hurt them downwards the road (so to speak) when they're looking for legislative and agency support to motion frontward on autonomous driving. Equally long as self-driving cars are existence driven on public roads, information technology's not possible to move ahead quickly without some level of regime support. Just this week Ford, Volvo, Google, Uber and Lyft formed the Cocky-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, calling for the feds to low-cal a fire and and support self-driving cars. Good luck.

Why does it matter what authorities thinks? The car industry may demand legislative description on liability laws affecting commuter-assisted cars coming to marketplace now and and then driverless cars. Infrastructure investments meliorate the car's ability to stay on the road, starting with better lane markings and camera-readable traffic signs that aren't faded. Long-haul trucking companies want blessing for convoys where only the first truck has a driver. Automakers would like inducements to brand us buy self-driving cars, including single-occupant vehicle access to HOV lanes and mayhap tax credits in the starting time 5-10 years until the price of sensors comes downward. Without authorities support, autonomous driving will exist slowed down.

CES 2008 Las Vegas Jan 7-10

Autonomous driving is arriving

Before 2000, the timetable for autonomous driving ranged from "non in our lifetime" to "maybe, um, 2030." Early in the 2000s, DARPA Challenge vehicles bristling with huge sensors stumbled through a mile or two of challenge courses and and then crashed or couldn't sense the path and gave up. Past 2007 (image above), six teams finished a 60-mile Urban Challenge course. Five years later high-end cars had rudimentary driver assists. At present there are multiple cars that accept reached Level 2 (of the 4 levels of autonomous driving), combined functionality, pregnant adaptive cruise control and lane centering. The next stride is limited cocky driving (Level 3) where the driver doesn't take to hold the wheel but must be available to take over within a few seconds. That could happen by 2022. Farther out, possibly 2030, maybe sooner, there'd be Level four full self-driving automation where the vehicle would be in control stop to terminate on the trip. The vehicle could be empty (a taxi dispatched to you) or the occupants could be children or crumbling seniors who didn't have licenses.

None of this increasingly quick time to availability matters if federal and land authorities don't grease the ways of self-driving vehicles with approvals and infrastructure upgrades, starting with lane markings the vehicles can run into, and approvals for hands-off driving. All this tin be done while notwithstanding making sure the vehicles are safe enough for public roads.

CadillacSuperCruise01.jpg

Automakers detect more than ways to arrive hot water

Hither's the trouble. Not a month goes by without at least one automaker shooting itself in the corporate foot. Last year four of Automotive News' top x stories of 2022 were well-nigh industry safety and emissions issues. No. one was VW's access of cheating on diesel fuel emissions tests. No. four was the tough stance taken by Marking Rosekind, the new ambassador of NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Assistants), tracking General Motors for its defective ignition switches and fining Fiat Chrysler $seventy million for "failure to written report legally required condom data." No. half-dozen was the ongoing airbag crisis at Takata where the metal housing for the inflator propellant could burst and spray the cockpit with shrapnel. No. ix was the question of why Ford installed actress forepart-end bracing merely in the Ford F-150 variant (SuperCrew) that was tested past the Insurance Information for Highway Safety; it had earned the Top Condom Pick rating. When IIHS noticed other F-150s didn't get the tubular bracing, it tested a F-150 Extended SuperCab and got a marginal rating.

As of 2022, the Takata airbag think now extends to xxx meg vehicles across some (not all) models from Acura, Audi, BMW, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Daimler, Contrivance (half dozen meg including RAM and Sprinter), Ford, GMC, Honda (almost 9 meg vehicles including Acura), Infiniti, Lexus, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Pontiac, Saab, RAM, Saturn, Sprinter, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Takata is the same visitor that suffered a widespread seatbelt recall in the 1990s.

This year, the VW diesel fuel emissions problem expanded to several other German automakers, including Audi (a VW subsidiary) and Mercedes-Benz. This month, Volkswagen reached an understanding to buy back the diesel cars it tin can't gear up; reportedly VW volition compensate the owners of repaired cars to the tune of $5,000 or $one billion total, meaning about 200,000 brand-goods that should nicely cover excess depreciation of the diesel fuel VWs. It also set aside $eighteen billion, a quarter of its overall value, for lawsuits, fines and repairs. Just this week a) Chrysler is recalling almost a million cars with perhaps faulty shifters; b) GM is recalling a meg pickup trucks with seat belts that may not restrain the commuter in a crash; c) Nissan is recalling 2022 Muranos whose restriction fluid reservoir O-ring may not provide good braking; d) Toyota and Lexus have an O-band issue that could mess with ABS, traction control and stability control; and east) it turns out VW apparently has been gaming the system on diesel emissions since 2006.

Besides this month, Mitsubishi admitted it fudged mileage results on its tiny Kei cars sold in Nihon under Mitsubishi and Nissan brand names, then came back a couple days and said that, actually, it had been doing it since 1991. With company stock devalued by half, the future of Mitsubishi may be in doubt. Information technology'due south possible the merely Mitsubishi conveyance non currently getting government scrutiny is the A6M Nil.

Auto fatalities 1920-2014 Kper100Mmiles

Deaths per 100 million miles are one-5th what they were in the 1960s, half what they were 15 years ago.

Overall, driving gets safer every yr

Auto fatalities 1920-2014 per100K pop

Deaths per 100,000 population since 1920.

All this begs the question of why, if automakers do then many things wrong, the feds should grease their ways and green-light their projects, including autonomous driving. 1 answer is that if the US gives autonomous driving projects a hard fourth dimension, information technology will be somewhere else in the globe. Another answer is that the defective ignition lock and fragmentation grenade airbag fatalities are tragedies to the dozens of families affected but, clinically put, they take well-nigh no statistical affect on overall machine prophylactic. Over the terminal 50 years, deaths per 100 meg vehicle miles traveled (chart in a higher place) are down 82%. In the next year or 2, there may be merely 1 death per 100 million miles traveled. Deaths per 100,000 people are down 55% over 50 years (inset chart). These are fairer means to mensurate fatalities over multiple decades because of the changes in population and miles driven. Beware anyone (including NHTSA) that prattles on about modest upticks in some function of the fatality rate; last autumn it said early returns from early-2015 numbers "correspond a troubling departure from a general downward trend."

The raw number of traffic deaths are down xi% to 32,675 in 2022 (the almost recent yr reported) despite the population doubling since the sixties. More importantly, the number of deaths is down 25% in the by decade, the biggest decline ever except during the four years of World State of war 2. As Americans under fifty run out of other things to dice from (no ane dies from polio or cholera; fewer children under 5 dice) what'southward left is car accidents plus a serious uptick in suicides and drug overdoses.

Volvo XC90 Drive Me

Assisted driving may be the next lifesaver

Post-Globe War 2 motorcar fatalities (raw and adjusted for population or miles driven) peaked in 1973 and started down, reflecting the get-go mandatory safety features: seat belts in the 1960s and shoulder-harness seat belts in the 1970s, which remain the all-time bang-for-the-buck prophylactic feature on cars. (Also the mid-1970s Arab oil embargo.) The 1980s saw increased police crackdown on drunken driving and the 21-year drinking age (although information technology drove some drinking underground), aided by some other fuel shortage early on in the decade, reducing deaths. The nineties saw widespread adoption of microprocessor-controlled airbags, and anti-lock braking systems (ABS) and their offshoot electronic stability command (ESC) systems. Reckoner simulation of crash tests has made the bodywork stronger, assuasive the engine compartment and trunk to plummet while maintaining the integrity of the cockpit.

What's left to improve safety? Information technology'south at present possible for less than $ane,000 to put bullheaded spot detection, lane departure alert, and adaptive cruise control (or at least forward standoff warning) on cars. Ofttimes those sensors can be used for rear cross traffic alert besides (niggling chance to lives, merely much take chances to sheet metal in parking lots) and pedestrian detection with warning and/or auto-braking. Pedestrians represented fifteen% of 2022 auto fatalities (four,884 of 32,675). Drowsy driver alert systems are inexpensive to implement, generally via tracking micro-movements of the steering wheel.

The side by side step is reaching that third level of autonomous driving, where the commuter has to exist in the commuter's seat, but doesn't accept to be hands-on with the steering wheel. It'southward here that the self-driving software algorithms have to get amend, the sensors have to come downwardly in cost (the cheapest lidar scanners are most $7,500), and the roadway infrastructure has to get better.

GM_AutonomousDriving-EDIT

What government can exercise to drop deaths from xxx,000 to 20,000

Even though automakers can be rascals (run across examples above), they recognize that safety does sell, something Volvo and the German automakers have known since the sixties. At present, assisted driving is cheap plenty to be on the average motorcar ($34,000 average transaction price, co-ordinate to Kelly Blue Book). Assisted driving now and self-driving over the next decade is the next step forwards in condom.

Here are some things the government tin can do:

  • Set federal standards for self-driving (yep, abrasive united states-righters) so there'due south only one set of rules to adhere to, with apparently different versions for rural Montana and bumper-to-bumper Miami. The first 5-10 years of hands-off cocky-driving will more often than not exist on interstates, which are federal roads.
  • Permit for different ways to accomplish a goal. For example, most automakers apply radar for adaptive prowl control, simply Subaru uses twin optical cameras, so don't require radar as the just style to meet a goal. Or let cars optically read speed limit signs now while waiting for DSRC (more beneath) to mature.
  • Let fuel economy credits for self-driving cars. In traffic, they don't speed up / slow down / speed upwardly every bit often as humans do. The EPA mpg numbers reflect a number of such adjustments already.
  • Don't dictate how liability is established as long as the industry agrees on a way to effigy out who pays when there'southward a cocky-driving car at fault in an accident.
  • Set the roads, roadway markings, and highway signs (which lose reflectivity in 5-7 years). Eventually DSRC (dedicated short-range communication) volition reign, but information technology's non set still and information technology needs critical mass, if not 100% penetration, to work well.
  • Raise the highway fuel tax to pay for improvements. 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline (24.4 cents for diesel) is dirt cheap by world standards. States should raises theirs, too, currently 26.49 cents per gallon on boilerplate (27.24 cents for diesel). Or stop diverting the taxes to non-transportation uses. Ane solution would be to enhance gas taxes by a nickel for every 25 cents fuel prices prices drib, and if they ascension, drop half not all of the revenue enhancement increase. If you lot're of a fiscally conservative bent, take the government tie that extra revenue to cuts elsewhere in federal taxation.
  • Consider revenue enhancement credits for self-driving cars in the same manner credits of upwardly to $vii,500 are offered for the commencement 200,000 EVs and plug-in hybrids an automaker sells. It might be more palatable if the tax credit scales down based on the vehicle cost, the thinking being that (for EVs, say) an $85,000 Tesla buyer doesn't demand $7,500 back as much every bit a $35,000 Nissan Leaf buyer does. The purpose of the credit would be to spur adoption, and so calibration down in the honor corporeality, and then go away. The EV credits later on 200,000 sales (per automaker) scale downwardly to 50% for two quarters and then to 25% for ii more quarters. Revenue enhancement credits for hybrid cars accept already come up and gone.
  • Consider HOV lane access for self-driving cars for 3, five, or 10 years. That's the inducement a Tesla AutoPilot user wants over a tax credit. Every bit with hybrids, brand the access get away once in that location are enough self-driving cars to start slowing the HOV lane. Virtually inquiry shows more self-driving cars can fit in i lane-mile of highway considering they're smoother getting on and off the throttle.
  • In the proper noun of safety, don't legislate self-driving cars out of beingness. At a NHTSA hearing this week, David Strickland of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets said, "Despite the arable benefits to club from this technology, there are policy problems and inconsistencies in the regulatory surroundings today that could greatly delay deployment or possibly deny full self driving from many that could benefit from its promise. The coalition will engage with civic leaders and then that whatever regulatory or legislative actions designed to ameliorate safety do not foreclose Level iv self-driving, and to ensure that this is accomplished in a timely manner."

But first, legislators and highway administrators have to acquire to alive with their short-term annoyance at some of the automakers' shenanigans. The feds besides need to do more than spot-checking of mandated tests (crash, fuel economy, emissions) and so it doesn't become out of hand. If the EPA had driven 1 VW diesel fuel on public roads with a sensor stuck in the tailpipe someday in the last decade, the game would accept been over for Volkswagen the side by side twenty-four hour period.

The assisted or cocky-driving auto is too important to be held dorsum. Information technology promises cyberspace gain in safety (say, 10X the number of crashes avoided as caused) and fuel economy. It will let more vehicles to travel on existing highways without building more lanes. At the fourth and terminal level (Level 4 ways no one has to be in the driver's seat), it's transportation for those too young or old to hold licenses.

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