Empty Cars Do Not Represent Progress

TL;DR

• Our goal should be personal cars which keep us safe.
• Only 26% of people think completely driverless cars are a good idea.
• Autonomous shuttles are great for closed campuses.

What was once the fever dream for Knight Rider writers may soon be a reality if Elon Musk has his way. 

We can look back at one of the first self-driving cars in popular media, KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) in the 1982 classic television series Knight Rider. KITT was also an early example of a functional AI assistant to Michael Knight, portrayed by David Hasselhoff.

Autonomous vehicle technology is not a monolith. It includes everything from cruise control to KITT from Knight Rider. The goal of self-driving cars doesn’t mean we want our cars to drive themselves.

Michael Knight states in the first episode: “I like to make my own decisions”, and, in fact, continues to decide to manually drive a majority of the time, to KITT’s chagrin. KITT offers suggestions and options, and offers to help, but the decision is ultimately up to Michael. In many ways KITT was more like a somewhat sentient AI assistant (voiced by William Daniels).

Knight’s preference of being in control is one which has been validated by many surveys and focus groups. A 2018 German survey even questioned if people want to be driving in self-driving cars, with “two thirds of all German drivers oppose to the idea of handing over full control to a driverless car.”

People have been conflating the ideas for years. When defined separately, car buyers have preferred cars with advanced driver-assisted capabilities, and have not wanted “widespread use of driverless cars” on the road. Stated differently, only 26% of people surveyed considered completely driverless cars to be a good idea.

Levels of Automation

The two overarching definitions are ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and ADS (Autonomous Driving Systems). ADS lays at the extreme end of the five levels of autonomous vehicles as defined by the Automation Levels by SAE, adopted by the National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

Level 0: Momentary Driver Assistance
Level 1: Driver Assistance
Level 2: Additional Assistance
Level 3: Conditional Automation
Level 4: High Automation
Level 5: Full Automation

Legislation

In legislatures around the world, there are scores of bills and laws being debated about the legality of autonomous vehicles with ADS operating on public roads. Australia just completed a public comment period for their upcoming legislation on Automated Vehicle Safety Reforms. 

We must not stand in the way of progress and innovation. 

Current Use Cases

A distinction needs to be made between the uses of ADS: 

• autonomous RoboTaxis
• personal automobiles with increased ADAS
• autonomous shuttles located on campuses

The question we should ask ourselves is what exactly the progress looks like. 

RoboTaxis

A bill in the California State Senate which would have allowed cities to regulate fully autonomous vehicles and fine them for breaking traffic laws was just pulled by its sponsor, after proposed amendments would have gutted any local government oversight and control. This bill was regarding RoboTaxis.

RoboTaxis are autonomous taxicabs which been recently described by one SoCal local as the “empty cars constantly driving down my block”. They had previously wreaked havoc in San Francisco. 

The companies developing the various RoboTaxis are being run by subsidiaries of tech behemoths like Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and traditional car manufacturers like GM-funded Cruise.

Over the past year, the NHTSA has opened investigations into every single one of these companies, citing numerous incidents ranging from vehicles which “exhibited unexpected behavior”, including crashes, blocking fire trucks, and a pedestrian being dragged 20 feet in San Francisco. 

Personal Automobiles

Progress and innovation will be when every new car is produced at a baseline level 3 automation.

Most cars on the road are already level 1. Human assistive systems with anti-lock brakes and which advise if a car is swerving or too close to another car, with sensors and cameras, are all standard in most cars made after 2020. Adaptive cruise control and more intelligent fuel usage, coupled with advances in hybrid technologies, already make the common car on the road more fuel efficient and safer than the gas-guzzler of the 1970s and 1980s.

Ford is a perfect of example of a company who is intelligently applying ADAS to every aspect of the driving experience, from active parking assist and stopping you rolling down slightly on a hill, to silently adapting your car’s traction to adverse road conditions, to pre-collision assist applying extra torque to your steering wheel and helping you swerve to avoid a collision. These advances are being branded as driver-assist features.

In contrast, Tesla’s current implementation of (Supervised) FSD (Full Self-Driving) Autopilot has resulted in accidents, bodily harm, and death. "The [NHTSA] found 211 incidents in which Teslas crashed on Autopilot, despite there being adequate time for drivers to avoid or mitigate collisions. In 111 cases, drivers went off roadways after inadvertently disengaging the system."

In GM’s consumer division, they’ve intelligently shifted from branding the Tesla FSD-like “Ultra Cruise” to being included in the larger Ford-like “Super Cruise” basket of general ADAS improvements.

Campus Shuttles

There are ongoing autonomous tests for shuttle service on school, company, airport, and hospital campuses. These shuttles potentially provide more frequent service for getting around campus, allow for quarantine-level safety protocols to be used in hospitals, and does not have the same risk profiles that cars on streets do.

These are also places where there are top-down decisions being made, with abilities to modify fleets. While it displaces a few drivers per location, it increases provided services to many more. These are being run by companies like Beep, Easymile and Adastec, with clients who provide oversight.

Progress and Innovation

Like Ford, we should be treating autonomous vehicle technology as a a basket of features, not as a product. There is a lot of potential progress to do. The more human-operated level 2 or level 3 cars on the road, the safer the roads will be for all.