Who's Behind the Wheel? Nobody.
09-24-2012, 09:18 AM
#1
Le Mans Master
Thread Starter
Who's Behind the Wheel? Nobody.
Those that attended Katech's Track Attack this past summer heard Bob Lutz talk about autonomous cars being the new future of the industry and the new way of travel to come. 20-30 years was the guesstimate. Racetracks may be the last place to drive manually operated cars, if you can find an old relic like the Z06. 
In today's WSJ
September 24, 2012
Who's Behind the Wheel? Nobody.
The driverless car is coming. And we all should be glad it is..
By DAN NEIL
The Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca is a 2.2-mile asphalt roller coaster plunging and soaring across California's tawny Monterey highlands. The most famous section, the Corkscrew, requires drivers storming up a long hill to slam the brakes and take a hard left into what seems to be thin air. The car goes momentarily weightless, and when the track materializes beneath you—always a pleasant surprise—it's going downhill like a ski jump—and, oh yeah, heading hard right.
This is one of several blind corners at Laguna Seca requiring drivers to commit to a turn long before they can actually see where they're going. If you wait to see the corner before you turn in for it, you'll wind up in Monterey.
As the automotive critic for The Wall Street Journal, I've been to Laguna Seca many times testing high-performance cars, and on this particular day in June 2011, I was driving brilliantly. I'd tamed the shrewish Corkscrew, unbent the Andretti hairpin. Like a Stradivarius pawed by Heifetz, so too the BMW in my hands.
Except that I wasn't really driving. While I was indeed in the driver's seat, my hands and feet were weirdly unoccupied.
The car was driving itself, digitally duplicating a lap driven earlier by a professional driver—a man now sitting on the pit wall, watching the car and me come and go. All I had to do was sit there, with the car dancing on the edge of control under me, manfully freaking out.
BMW's TrackTrainer—an experimental 330i sedan bristling with machine-vision equipment—uses GPS, track maps and telemetry recorded during a professional driver's model lap to negotiate a racecourse. Drivers-in-training can receive "haptic" feedback—a buzzing sensation on the right or left side of the seat bolsters—and visual cues that guide them through the turns, like the preferred-line graphic superimposed in a video driving game. Or, the car can take over the wheel, gas and brakes altogether, re-creating the pro's lap, almost to the last inch of asphalt. Then it can do it again, exactly, beautifully.
Damn. I can accept the notion of autonomous cars as our dronish helpmates, and I certainly welcome the technology's promise to impose order on our dangerous, uncoordinated, inefficient traffic system. Hail ants.
But do robots have to drive better than I do? I always took a measured pride in my driving skills. Honestly, these days, a robo-driver would certainly kick my butt at the Nurburgring, Germany's famously baffling racecourse set in the forests of the Eifel Mountains, a 173-turn, 14-mile-long maze that tests a driver's memory as much as skill.
This, I think, is an underappreciated point about autonomous mobility: These systems, quietly under development for decades, have long since passed the point of mere driving competence to arrive at something like expert status.
And these are yet the stone axes of autonomy. By the time this technology is commercialized, robotically operated cars will be safer, probably a lot safer, than manually operated cars. Autopilots will never get distracted, sleepy, lost, angry. Their reactions will be instantaneous and in an emergency always the right one. They will always signal when changing lanes, never tailgate. Your kids will never have to wrap themselves around a tree on the way home from a party.
So, you see, autopilot cars will be safer. Which means those who persist in manually operating cars will be less safe. They, we, will represent risk, exposure.
We'll have to be stopped.
The cost of automobile accidents in the U.S. (measured in death, disability, health care and property loss) totals $300 billion annually, according to AAA estimates. The cost of traffic congestion (lost productivity, wasted petroleum, among other factors) AAA reckons at about $100 billion. Taken together, the costs of automotive death and delay equal 2.6% of GDP.
Our new robot chauffeurs can help. By communicating and cooperating among themselves and with the roadway, autonomous vehicles can safely maintain closer following distances, merge without hesitation and avoid the knock-on delays of stop-and-go traffic (which multiply drivers' lagging reaction time), increasing roadways' carrying capacity at a fraction of the cost of new concrete.
Auto-mobility is a huge gift to policy makers, and they'd be right to privilege it. Look for, among other things, preferential insurance rates, HOV lane access, reduced tolls, and the suspension of congestion fees entering urban areas such as San Francisco and Manhattan. This is an arc of exception like that currently enjoyed by electric cars, which also offer much to the Common Good.
The danger will come not from auto-piloted vehicles but from the holdouts, those drivers who for whatever reason rely on the faulty, flimsy wetware between their ears. What will be normative? Should manually operated vehicles be the ones to give way? Or should autopilot cars (with special running lights) be especially deferential to their inferior human counterparts?
Make no mistake: What's in play is the emergence of a caste-based traffic system, one of robot-haves and have-nots, of steely-eyed electronic wheelmen vs. Uncle Ed with the bad knee. The dead-enders won't give up easily. They'll cling to their steering wheels. There will be friction. But it will all be over pretty quickly.
Twenty-five years from now, piloting one's own vehicle will seem weirdly anachronistic and unnecessary, like riding a mule to the mall. Just say the address, say "go," sit back and get on with your hologram. What's your problem?
Nobody cares about driving anymore.
My editors want me to address the potential dislocations between Man and Machine when cars begin to drive themselves. "The End of the Road," and so on, the presumption being that with autonomous mobility and intelligent highway technology, something valuable, something defining will have been lost. Let's call it: the American Romance with the Automobile, or the ARA.
No American need be lectured about the ARA. Americans love cars and love driving, so the myth goes. Cars are special to us. By virtue of our peculiar history (Model T) and sprawling geography, we have come to see ourselves as singularly entitled, automotively.
A key feature of the ARA is the idea of self-direction, embodied in the very word "automobile." The ARA seduces us with promises of liberty. It's about volition on a personal and Calvinist level. It imagines us approaching a West Texas crossroad in a spirit of unfettered spontaneity. Life is a highway.
The ARA is, in other words, about control, which I propose to take away from you, if you'll bear with me.
Let me tell you something about the ARA. It was, first of all, an advertising construct, a fiction created by the oil and lodging industries in the early 20th century to coax Americans out on the road in their flivvers and Packards. Like all good advertising, the early ARA imagery tapped into deeper things. It flattered Americans' pastoral and pioneer self-conceptions. The city was a blighted, unhealthy, confining place—in 20th-century America that was true enough—and travel-related advertising urged Americans to take to the open-road cure, to reclaim their unfenced inheritance.
The reality early motorists found on America's byways—miserable roads, overheating cars, fragile balloon tires, crude accommodations—bore no resemblance to the carefree sojourns of Esso ads. A century of mythmaking later, the ARA is still a creature of advertisers and still comprises imagery wildly at odds with everyday experience.
Two words: pecan log.
My point is that it's all a massive, crushing lie. For the majority of Americans, the ARA has been repealed for some time. The automobile is an onerous, expensive obligation and necessity, and in the case of the working poor a brutal tax. Even for those who can afford them, the car/truck/minivan offers precious little succor. The average commute in the U.S. is about 50 minutes, the scene of accumulated years' worth of lost life and productivity, trapped behind the wheel.
To eulogize the ARA is therefore to misjudge the moment. Americans have already fallen profoundly out of love with the automobile. Obtaining a driver's license was once a ritual of American youth, and yet by 2010, more than 30% of Americans ages 17 to 19 did not possess a driver's license, up sharply from 12.7% in 1983, according to a study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
And, obviously, people have better things to do. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in 2010 18% of injury accidents (3,092 deaths and 416,000 injuries) involved driver distraction—eating, grooming, talking on a cellphone or texting. The National Safety Council estimates that about 2.6 million accidents a year are caused by cellphone use and texting.
So, then, no more tears for the ARA. Autonomy can do the daily tasks of driving faster, cheaper, safer, better, and we should let it.
Give people a button that says "Home" and I guarantee they will push it.
And autonomy is how we beat the Chinese.
Stay with me: As a mature, postindustrial society, the U.S. has in many ways topped out economically (population growth, consumption) compared with younger competitors on the world stage. Americans are learning hard lessons about the value of their work in a race-to-the-bottom global economy.
The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.
If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time on their hands. It would be, from an economist's point of view, the Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie washing upon our shores.
In the history of human civilization, has there ever been a society to offer so much uninterrupted head space to so many? Europe's medieval monastic tradition created scholars, true, but only a relative handful.
Periclean Athens? It took thousands of peasants beyond the Agora to support the work of one intellectual aristocrat such as Plato or Aristophanes. The temples of Buddhism sheltered only a lucky few, and besides, the Buddhist meditative tradition pursues a selfless emptiness, a still point, the harking of universal immanence. It ain't brainstorming.
Perhaps only the indigenous plenty societies of the pre-Columbian Pacific Northwest had anything like the democratized downtime that we, with our automatic cars, could enjoy.
It's possible that all these suddenly idle driver/passengers will waste their gift, texting, watching TV or worse. But many of them, like me, would beaver into work, happy to get a jump on the day.
And here's the best part. I always get my best ideas in the car—in solitude, watching the unwinding of the road, hearing the thrum of the tires. You know that space, right?
So don't be afraid of autonomy. Embrace it. Use it. Going forward, we're going to need everybody's best ideas.
Mr. Neil is a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal in New York. He can be reached at dan.neil@ wsj.com.
In today's WSJ
September 24, 2012
Who's Behind the Wheel? Nobody.
The driverless car is coming. And we all should be glad it is..
By DAN NEIL
The Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca is a 2.2-mile asphalt roller coaster plunging and soaring across California's tawny Monterey highlands. The most famous section, the Corkscrew, requires drivers storming up a long hill to slam the brakes and take a hard left into what seems to be thin air. The car goes momentarily weightless, and when the track materializes beneath you—always a pleasant surprise—it's going downhill like a ski jump—and, oh yeah, heading hard right.
This is one of several blind corners at Laguna Seca requiring drivers to commit to a turn long before they can actually see where they're going. If you wait to see the corner before you turn in for it, you'll wind up in Monterey.
As the automotive critic for The Wall Street Journal, I've been to Laguna Seca many times testing high-performance cars, and on this particular day in June 2011, I was driving brilliantly. I'd tamed the shrewish Corkscrew, unbent the Andretti hairpin. Like a Stradivarius pawed by Heifetz, so too the BMW in my hands.
Except that I wasn't really driving. While I was indeed in the driver's seat, my hands and feet were weirdly unoccupied.
The car was driving itself, digitally duplicating a lap driven earlier by a professional driver—a man now sitting on the pit wall, watching the car and me come and go. All I had to do was sit there, with the car dancing on the edge of control under me, manfully freaking out.
BMW's TrackTrainer—an experimental 330i sedan bristling with machine-vision equipment—uses GPS, track maps and telemetry recorded during a professional driver's model lap to negotiate a racecourse. Drivers-in-training can receive "haptic" feedback—a buzzing sensation on the right or left side of the seat bolsters—and visual cues that guide them through the turns, like the preferred-line graphic superimposed in a video driving game. Or, the car can take over the wheel, gas and brakes altogether, re-creating the pro's lap, almost to the last inch of asphalt. Then it can do it again, exactly, beautifully.
Damn. I can accept the notion of autonomous cars as our dronish helpmates, and I certainly welcome the technology's promise to impose order on our dangerous, uncoordinated, inefficient traffic system. Hail ants.
But do robots have to drive better than I do? I always took a measured pride in my driving skills. Honestly, these days, a robo-driver would certainly kick my butt at the Nurburgring, Germany's famously baffling racecourse set in the forests of the Eifel Mountains, a 173-turn, 14-mile-long maze that tests a driver's memory as much as skill.
This, I think, is an underappreciated point about autonomous mobility: These systems, quietly under development for decades, have long since passed the point of mere driving competence to arrive at something like expert status.
And these are yet the stone axes of autonomy. By the time this technology is commercialized, robotically operated cars will be safer, probably a lot safer, than manually operated cars. Autopilots will never get distracted, sleepy, lost, angry. Their reactions will be instantaneous and in an emergency always the right one. They will always signal when changing lanes, never tailgate. Your kids will never have to wrap themselves around a tree on the way home from a party.
So, you see, autopilot cars will be safer. Which means those who persist in manually operating cars will be less safe. They, we, will represent risk, exposure.
We'll have to be stopped.
The cost of automobile accidents in the U.S. (measured in death, disability, health care and property loss) totals $300 billion annually, according to AAA estimates. The cost of traffic congestion (lost productivity, wasted petroleum, among other factors) AAA reckons at about $100 billion. Taken together, the costs of automotive death and delay equal 2.6% of GDP.
Our new robot chauffeurs can help. By communicating and cooperating among themselves and with the roadway, autonomous vehicles can safely maintain closer following distances, merge without hesitation and avoid the knock-on delays of stop-and-go traffic (which multiply drivers' lagging reaction time), increasing roadways' carrying capacity at a fraction of the cost of new concrete.
Auto-mobility is a huge gift to policy makers, and they'd be right to privilege it. Look for, among other things, preferential insurance rates, HOV lane access, reduced tolls, and the suspension of congestion fees entering urban areas such as San Francisco and Manhattan. This is an arc of exception like that currently enjoyed by electric cars, which also offer much to the Common Good.
The danger will come not from auto-piloted vehicles but from the holdouts, those drivers who for whatever reason rely on the faulty, flimsy wetware between their ears. What will be normative? Should manually operated vehicles be the ones to give way? Or should autopilot cars (with special running lights) be especially deferential to their inferior human counterparts?
Make no mistake: What's in play is the emergence of a caste-based traffic system, one of robot-haves and have-nots, of steely-eyed electronic wheelmen vs. Uncle Ed with the bad knee. The dead-enders won't give up easily. They'll cling to their steering wheels. There will be friction. But it will all be over pretty quickly.
Twenty-five years from now, piloting one's own vehicle will seem weirdly anachronistic and unnecessary, like riding a mule to the mall. Just say the address, say "go," sit back and get on with your hologram. What's your problem?
Nobody cares about driving anymore.
My editors want me to address the potential dislocations between Man and Machine when cars begin to drive themselves. "The End of the Road," and so on, the presumption being that with autonomous mobility and intelligent highway technology, something valuable, something defining will have been lost. Let's call it: the American Romance with the Automobile, or the ARA.
No American need be lectured about the ARA. Americans love cars and love driving, so the myth goes. Cars are special to us. By virtue of our peculiar history (Model T) and sprawling geography, we have come to see ourselves as singularly entitled, automotively.
A key feature of the ARA is the idea of self-direction, embodied in the very word "automobile." The ARA seduces us with promises of liberty. It's about volition on a personal and Calvinist level. It imagines us approaching a West Texas crossroad in a spirit of unfettered spontaneity. Life is a highway.
The ARA is, in other words, about control, which I propose to take away from you, if you'll bear with me.
Let me tell you something about the ARA. It was, first of all, an advertising construct, a fiction created by the oil and lodging industries in the early 20th century to coax Americans out on the road in their flivvers and Packards. Like all good advertising, the early ARA imagery tapped into deeper things. It flattered Americans' pastoral and pioneer self-conceptions. The city was a blighted, unhealthy, confining place—in 20th-century America that was true enough—and travel-related advertising urged Americans to take to the open-road cure, to reclaim their unfenced inheritance.
The reality early motorists found on America's byways—miserable roads, overheating cars, fragile balloon tires, crude accommodations—bore no resemblance to the carefree sojourns of Esso ads. A century of mythmaking later, the ARA is still a creature of advertisers and still comprises imagery wildly at odds with everyday experience.
Two words: pecan log.
My point is that it's all a massive, crushing lie. For the majority of Americans, the ARA has been repealed for some time. The automobile is an onerous, expensive obligation and necessity, and in the case of the working poor a brutal tax. Even for those who can afford them, the car/truck/minivan offers precious little succor. The average commute in the U.S. is about 50 minutes, the scene of accumulated years' worth of lost life and productivity, trapped behind the wheel.
To eulogize the ARA is therefore to misjudge the moment. Americans have already fallen profoundly out of love with the automobile. Obtaining a driver's license was once a ritual of American youth, and yet by 2010, more than 30% of Americans ages 17 to 19 did not possess a driver's license, up sharply from 12.7% in 1983, according to a study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
And, obviously, people have better things to do. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in 2010 18% of injury accidents (3,092 deaths and 416,000 injuries) involved driver distraction—eating, grooming, talking on a cellphone or texting. The National Safety Council estimates that about 2.6 million accidents a year are caused by cellphone use and texting.
So, then, no more tears for the ARA. Autonomy can do the daily tasks of driving faster, cheaper, safer, better, and we should let it.
Give people a button that says "Home" and I guarantee they will push it.
And autonomy is how we beat the Chinese.
Stay with me: As a mature, postindustrial society, the U.S. has in many ways topped out economically (population growth, consumption) compared with younger competitors on the world stage. Americans are learning hard lessons about the value of their work in a race-to-the-bottom global economy.
The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.
If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time on their hands. It would be, from an economist's point of view, the Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie washing upon our shores.
In the history of human civilization, has there ever been a society to offer so much uninterrupted head space to so many? Europe's medieval monastic tradition created scholars, true, but only a relative handful.
Periclean Athens? It took thousands of peasants beyond the Agora to support the work of one intellectual aristocrat such as Plato or Aristophanes. The temples of Buddhism sheltered only a lucky few, and besides, the Buddhist meditative tradition pursues a selfless emptiness, a still point, the harking of universal immanence. It ain't brainstorming.
Perhaps only the indigenous plenty societies of the pre-Columbian Pacific Northwest had anything like the democratized downtime that we, with our automatic cars, could enjoy.
It's possible that all these suddenly idle driver/passengers will waste their gift, texting, watching TV or worse. But many of them, like me, would beaver into work, happy to get a jump on the day.
And here's the best part. I always get my best ideas in the car—in solitude, watching the unwinding of the road, hearing the thrum of the tires. You know that space, right?
So don't be afraid of autonomy. Embrace it. Use it. Going forward, we're going to need everybody's best ideas.
Mr. Neil is a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal in New York. He can be reached at dan.neil@ wsj.com.
09-24-2012, 09:24 AM
#2
Le Mans Master
Stanford did it at Thunderhill with an Audi TT as well. We're not to the point of The Jetson's just yet but as an automotive engineer it's very interesting to see how they're progressing.
http://forums.corvetteforum.com/auto...underhill.html
http://forums.corvetteforum.com/auto...underhill.html
09-24-2012, 07:52 PM
#6
Racer
"I, Robot." I don't mind the idea of having a car that can drive itself for the mundane tasks (to the store, to work, etc) but I do enjoy driving, as I'm sure the rest of you do. You can count on me always having a sports car that requires a driver and fully defeatable stability control.
