A weekend blog entry, What
We're Driving At by Google Distinguished Software Engineer
Sebastian Thrun, reveals that the company is not only developing cars
that can drive themselves, it is already testing them on public
highways.
Is Driving a 'Really Big Problem'?
Thrun says that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google because
they wanted to help solve "really big problems" using technology and
notes that one of the big problems they're applying Google's formidable
innovating prowess and engineering expertise to is automobile safety
and efficiency, with the objectives being to help prevent traffic
accidents, free up people's time, and reduce carbon emissions by
fundamentally changing car use.
San Francisco's Lombard Street.
"Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from
our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood
Boulevard," Thrun writes. "They've driven down Lombard
Street [a street in San Francisco famous for a steeply inclined
one-block section consisting of tight hairpin turns], crossed the
Golden Gate
bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast
Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe [a large lake
on the California-Nevada border]. All in all, our self-driving cars
have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics
research."
Cars navigating Lombard Street in San Francisco.
Probably an understatement.
Thrun assures readers that safety has been priority one in this
project, affirming that the fleet of seven prototype cars are never
driven on public roads unmanned - they always have a trained safety
driver behind the wheel who can take over instantly as easily as one
disengages cruise control and a trained software operator in the
passenger seat to monitor the software.
Test drives are preceded by dispatching a driver in a
conventionally-driven car to map the route and road conditions. Mapping
road-features like lane markers and traffic signs allows the automation
software to become familiar with the environment and its
characteristics in advance. "And," he adds, "we've briefed local police
on our work."
Is It Legal?
I had wondered about the legality aspect of operating a
computer-controlled car on public highways, even with the backup driver
and computer tech riding shotgun. In Are
Google's Driverless Cars Legal?, Justin Hyde of Jalopnik.com
wondered too and looked into the matter, finding that according to
California authorities, there are no laws that would prevent Google
from this sort of testing so long as there's a human behind the wheel
ready to take over should something go wrong. Hyde cites California
Department of Motor Vehicles spokesman Mike Marando commenting that
Google's software "would be just a big step up from cruise control. If
the vehicle goes too fast, or strays across the line, the human would
be responsible for operating the car legally."
Thrun says that Google has always been optimistic about technology's
ability to advance society, and that is why the Google team is pushing
hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they
are today. Very much still in the experimental stage, he predicts that
it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the
future, thanks to advanced computer science - and he deems that future
very exciting.
Save the Manuals!
No doubt for techno-geeks. Not so much for serious automobile
enthusiasts. In the July 2010 issue of Car and Driver magazine,
Editor Eddie Alterman launched a
Save the Manuals campaign to promote a revival of human driving
skills, focusing on the disappearing ability among US drivers to
operate vehicles with manually-shifted gearboxes and the diminishing
proportion of cars sold equipped with manual transmissions.
Alterman cites a recent Washington Post report that today's
hard-texting, IT-obsessed youth are inclined to dismiss driving as
seriously lame, with only about 30% of 16-year-olds having even
bothered to acquire driving licenses, according to 2008 research.
That's a "distressing" statistic, says Alterman, and as a lifelong
automobile aficionado, this writer concurs.
When I was sixteen, getting a driver's license was a near-universal
rite of passage. I took my driving test and passed six days after my
sixteenth birthday. However, one of my own daughters has reached the
age of 26 without getting around to taking a driving test, although
she's traveled the world extensively. My other daughter is carrying on
the family tradition as a consummate auto-enthusiast and hot-rodder who
makes her living working on cars and is a skilled driver, but I
digress.
Mastering Your Car
CandD's Alterman maintains that if drivers learned to operate an
entire car, not just the steering wheel and brakes, they'd probably
like driving better through mastering the sense of control imparted by
that third pedal, learning the excitement that accompanies a perfectly
timed heel-and-toe downshift. He declares that we need a "crusade" to
save the manuals and advocates training youth in the ancient ways of
the stick shift, a subsidiary advantage of which would be the fact that
you can't text while driving a manual transmission vehicle.
Jalopnik's Hyde agrees, lamenting that, sadly, modern vehicles have
been replacing drivers with technology for years, adaptive cruise
control now coming standard on many luxury models, with some Ford and
Lexus vehicles able to parallel park on their own with only brake
inputs from the driver and more advanced systems such as the one on the
new Volvo S60 that apply the brakes automatically if they sense a crash
is imminent.
Of course, Alterman's advocacy diametrically contradicts what Google
is about with its self-driving car project, which - if it ever becomes
the dominant motif - would pretty much nail down the coffin lid on
traditional (or much of any) driving skills. I'm solidly in Alterman's
camp, but we're bucking a trend, and resistance to Google's vision may
ultimately be futile.
