TECHNICALLY SPEAKING_by paul mcfedries

Your Inevitable
Robocar Future
Hands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an
unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.
Weve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy. 2011 Chrysler ad
watch j ust a bou t any movie or television show set in the not-too-

distant future and youll soon notice that although there are still plenty
of cars on the road, nobody drives them. Or, I should say, no human
drives them. From the Johnny Cabs in Total Recall to the sleek Lexus
2054 in Minority Report, in these imagined futures robots and computers have taken
over the driving duties. Science fiction portrays autonomous cars as inevitable,
but will we really see them anytime soon? We already have self-parking cars from
companies such as BMW, Lexus, and Toyota, in which an onboard sensor detects
a suitable parking spot and a built-in computer controls steering, accelerator, and
brake to maneuver the car into the spot. But automatic parking (even the neat trick
of automatic parallel parking) is a long way from automatic driving, although it
might not be as long as you think. Google, famously, has been testing a fleet of cars
that can operate in auto-drive mode. Google cofounder Sergey Brin was asked in
2013 when driverless cars might become mainstream, and he replied, You can
count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.
With nearly every major car companyincluding Audi, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan,
Tesla, and Volkswagentesting robotic car prototypes, and with robocars already
legal (albeit with restrictions) in California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada, the fulfillment of Brins prediction is probably not far off. Some are also predicting that we
wont need to own cars when theyre all self-driving. If you can summon a robotaxi
in minutes with a few taps on your smartphone, who needs the hassle and expense

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04.TechnicallySpeaking.NA.indd 28

opinion

of car ownership? (Since you in effect

whistle for such a car, in a high-tech
version of whistling for a taxi, robocabs
and similar self-delivering vehicles are
sometimes called whistlecars.) If this
all sounds very Uber-like, know that
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has declared
that replacing the companys current
fleet of human-driven vehicles with
selfdriven vehicles is inevitable and
will make the service incredibly cheap
because there will be no other dude in
the car to pay for. A similar idea is the
deliverbot (also called the robotruck),
an unmanned vehicle for delivering packages and other cargo.
But a car that can drive itself is only
the beginning. The long-term vision
is to combine smart cars with smart
roads. That is, an advanced connected
car will drive autonomously, and it will
tap into the sensors and beacons that
will festoon future roads and highways,
leading to the ideal of crash-avoiding
or c
rashless vehicles. This will also enable p
latooning, in which cars drive
at a steady speed and follow each other at a set distance. The resulting car
train or road train will be completely
controlled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V )
communication and interaction with the
so-called automated highway system
(or i ntelligent transport system). The
ultimate goal is an autocar that is so intelligent and so safe that you could fall
asleep in itthe pie-in-the-sky, head-onthe-pillow sleeper car.
The cloud of words and phrases surrounding self-driving vehicles is interesting, and the technology itself offers a
fascinating glimpse into the near future,
but do we really need driverless cars and
smart roads and vehicle platoons? Well,
lets look at the facts. Drivers run stop
signs, cut off pedestrians, tailgate the car
in front, and race the car behind. And
they do all this and worse in a fog of b
arely
contained road rage. No wonder more
than 32,000 people are killed in traffic
accidents every year in the U
nited States
alone. Clearly, when it comes to robocars,
the future cant come soon enough. n
illustration by Christian Northeast

3/10/15 2:09 PM