Are You Ready for the Self-Driving Car?

Illustration by MCKIBILLO

Thirty miles per hour doesn’t feel very fast until you’re suddenly heading for a collision. I’m doing 30 when a minivan darts into my lane. I’m instantly faced with a poor set of choices: Go straight into the van or swerve right toward the sidewalk, where a sturdy light post awaits. The brake pedal pulses with chatter from the antilock system as I cut right toward the pole and the guy in the van makes his own evasive maneuvers. A second later, I’m stopped between the van and the light post, somehow without touching either one. There are inches to spare on either side.

I’d like to think that my unflappable poise and cheetah reflexes saved the day, but I have to admit it wasn’t all me. The Mercedes CL550 I was driving has a system called Pre-Safe Brake that uses forward-looking radar to anticipate collisions, braking the car all on its own. And even if you stab the brakes before the radar spots an incoming minivan, for example, the prescient Benz gives you maximum stopping power before you can even fully depress the pedal, compensating for the inherent weak link in any braking performance — you and your ponderous nervous system. Car companies have realized what jet manufacturers have known for a long time: Computers are safer than humans, and that’s why we’re heading, however slowly, for driverless cars.

Anyone who’s had his laptop crash in the middle of an important session of FarmVille would be reluctant to let a computer take the wheel of his car. But we’ve been ceding responsibility to the algorithms for a long time now. Antilock brakes and stability control systems are already ubiquitous, and starting with the 2012 model year, they’ll be standard in every new car sold in the U.S. And if you’ve got a car with stability control, you’ve got a car that can steer itself.

A few years ago, I got caught in a blizzard while driving a Cadillac CTS. As I slowly slid downhill toward an oncoming car, the car’s stability control system made a memorable save. No amount of experience will let me brake a single wheel to correct a skid. The Cadillac’s electronic brains did just that, and a crisis was averted.

In the past decade, electronic driver aids have proliferated and improved. Adaptive cruise-control systems use radar or lasers to track the car ahead and maintain a safe distance. The early ones were terrible, slamming the brakes like a panicky driver’s ed teacher whenever a car pulled into the lane. And none of the first-generation systems allowed you to follow closely enough to prevent humans from cutting you off. But the new Jaguars let you choose your following distance, and at the most aggressive setting, they’ll tailgate like Tony Stewart bump-drafting at Talladega. I mean it as high praise when I say Jag has developed a computer system that drives like a real asshole.

All of those systems, though, presume some agency on the part of the driver. You’re still pushing the brake pedal, steering, or setting the cruise control. But the smartest engineers realize that the best robo-driver systems would require you to do nothing at all. The extreme realization of that concept is Google’s driverless Prius, which, the company says, has covered some 140,000 miles with only one accident (which, Google says, happened under human control). When Google revealed that it had autonomous cars running around the Bay Area, the most surprising thing about the news was the lack of surprise. You’d think it would be a worldwide sensation, a 1950s Popular Mechanics cover come to life, but the general sentiment seemed to be, “Oh, sure. That figures. Now what’s Pippa Middleton up to?” And maybe the lack of amazement over the driverless car comes from the fact that we’re halfway there already.

The 2010 Volvo XC60 debuted with a system called City Safety, which uses a laser sensor to identify obstacles and slow you down before you ram into something. According to a two-year study by the Highway Loss Data Institute and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, those XC60s had collision-claim frequencies 22 percent lower than other midsize SUVs. Now allow me to translate that in nonboring terms: Around the country, Volvos are slamming on their own brakes to avoid collisions (and, with a system on the S60, pedestrians) while their owners sip lattes and listen to NPR. Pardon me, but holy shit.

The steering wheel is the next frontier, and electric power steering has already helped enable the self-parking car. A few months ago, I was driving a Lincoln MKT equipped with a self-parking system, and I decided to try it out on Boston’s Beacon Hill, which is sometimes like trying to parallel-park on the Matterhorn. I was briskly reversing into a parking space, my hands gratuitously free of the madly spinning steering wheel, when a woman walking past stopped to gawk in disbelief. “Did that car just park itself?” she asked. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

I concur. Even if I’m perfectly capable of parking for myself, letting the car do it is both a great party trick and a godsend for people who view parallel parking as a series of fender benders. Taking that premise even further, BMW built a 330i that can run driverless laps at racetracks that it’s “learned.” But that exercise, and the self-parking Fords and Lexuses that you can buy now, is ultimately a parlor trick, an automotive player piano. The real action is on the streets. And letting the algorithms take the wheel amid the chaos of public roads is another matter entirely.

But it’s going to happen. And soon. Toyota recently showed the Asian media a new collision-avoidance system that relies on millimeter wave radar and two cameras with infrared night vision to actively steer around obstacles. The radar calculates your speed, while the cameras are the car’s eyes, recognizing what kind of object you’re about to crush with your Lexus. (Volvo’s new pedestrian-detection system uses a high-resolution camera that compares what it sees with a database of pedestrian images: Basically, the cameras are making the radar smarter.) I asked Toyota whether this is strictly a science project or something that’s in the production pipeline, and I was told that this is heading for production cars in the near future. So, for example, if you’re turning left and there’s a car coming at you from the right, your car will dial in a harder turn to avoid a crash.

While these sorts of safety improvements are noble, they’re ultimately reactive and used only in emergency situations. But what if you could delegate your daily, spirit-crushing commute to your robo-chauffeur? That’s the Holy Grail. Because no matter how much you love driving, nobody loves to feel their life trickle away while staring at the bumper of an F-150 for an hour each morning.

To that end, Mercedes and Audi are working on systems that will control your car in heavy traffic, without your getting bored or flipping anyone off. You say you want me to surrender control of the steering wheel to an Audi and in return I get to quit obsessing over whether the next lane over is .001 percent faster? Where do I sign up?

People who fear the relentless progress toward autonomous vehicles tend to say things like, “How can you support this if you love cars?” Well, here’s how: I don’t want a car to drive the Tail of the Dragon for me. I want it to drive me to work. Imagine a highway of computer-driven cars, cruising along in tight formation at 80 miles per hour without crashing or causing traffic jams. That’s not a dystopian nightmare. That, to me, sounds like a dream.

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This article originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.

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Posted by Dania on 19:32. Filed under Ready, SelfDriving . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Feel free to leave a response