00:00:02 SPK_1

Hello and welcome to the car and Driver podcast. Today our topic is about the on road
performance of self driving and assisted driving cars.

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Our guest today is Erica Brown. Erica is a researcher at Stockholm University, and she and
her colleagues have been doing analysis of YouTube videos made by the drivers themselves,
and these show how self driving and assisted driving cars actually behave on the open road.

00:00:28 SPK_1
Welcome, Erica.

00:00:29 SPK_2
Hello. Thank you for having me, Erika.

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There's a lot of excitement these days about the developments being made with
autonomous vehicles. In an earlier podcast, we spoke to a traffic management specialist and
the city planner about the potential for increased use of ccavs.

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CCAV stands for shared electric connected autonomous vehicles. These vehicles could
transform cities, not only in terms of transport, but also in land use and overall quality of
life.

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What can your research tell us about how close we are to achieving these types of goals?

00:01:04 SPK_2
Well, when we look around at the current state of development in autonomous cars, we can
see that we're in a state of transition. A city traffic system that makes full use of sea cars and
eliminates the need for human drivers is at the far end of that transition.

00:01:21 SPK_2
We're still in the very early stages where most cars on the road are still primarily controlled
by human drivers, and we may never actually reach the stage where human drivers
disappear entirely. Now, for many people, when they think about the development of self
driving or assisted driving cars, they largely view this development as a series of technical
problems that need to be overcome.

00:01:48 SPK_2
However, our research has been looking at what goes on while people are driving these
types of cars on real roads. And what we found is that driving is not just a technical
problem, it's also a practical problem and sometimes even an emotional problem, as we can
see in instances of road rage.

00:02:11 SPK_2
So our research doesn't directly address your question. Instead, we're taking a much
narrower focus and looking at some of the issues that developers will need to address to get
us through the transition phase where self driving vehicles are still sharing the road with
human drivers.

00:02:31 SPK_1
That's an interesting point. When we think about a city that makes full use of sea cabs, a key
concern is how the vehicle will communicate with each other.

00:02:41 SPK_1
But what you're saying is that during the transition period, developers also have to think
about how self driving cars communicate with human drivers.

00:02:50 SPK_2
Exactly. Our research shows that the road is a social space where there are ongoing
interactions between drivers.

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What we are particularly interested in is how self driving or assisted driving cars manage
this social space.

00:03:07 SPK_1
And what prompted you to conduct this type of research?

00:03:10 SPK_2
Well, one criticism that we can make about much existing research on the safety and
effectiveness of autonomous and assisted driving systems is the over reliance on simulator
data and simulator situations. These can miss out many important aspects of driving, such
as the role of passengers as co pilots, co pilot, sorry.

00:03:35 SPK_2
And the actions of other drivers on the road. So what's really distinctive about our work is
that we focus on real world driving situations as much as possible.

00:03:46 SPK_1
And that's where YouTube comes in.

00:03:48 SPK_2
Yes, we can already see both Google Cars and Tesla's with their autopilot function on the
road. And their presence on the road is essentially an enormous, unsupervised field trial
that is currently going on all around the world.

00:04:06 SPK_2
But we have relatively little access to the data and experiences of those cars on the road.
However, if you just do a search on YouTube for self driving cars, you'll get many videos of
Tesla in its autopilot mode and many videos of the Google car and the competitors.

00:04:26 SPK_2
So, ironically, by using what seems like an unconventional approach to data collection, we
were able to get more diverse data from more countries and a more diverse set of situations
than if we'd set up our own controlled study. We were also able to collect data on critical
moments.

00:04:48 SPK_2
These are near misses that you perhaps wouldn't get from normal methods.

00:04:54 SPK_1
Did you include the drivers in your research?

00:04:56 SPK_2
Yes, the drivers actually talked to the camera, so we were able to collect data that's very
similar to what we get when we ask drivers to think aloud while they're driving. For our
most recent study, we were able to analyze ten and a half hours of Tesla Autopilot and
Google self driving car.

00:05:16 SPK_1
Before we go any further, could you explain to our listeners the difference between a car
with autopilot and a self driving car?

00:05:24 SPK_2
Sure. Let's take Tesla Autopilot as an example.

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Excuse me. There are three main Tesla autopilot functions.

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First, an adaptive cruise control that relies on distance to the car in front to accelerate and
decelerate the car. An auto steer function that uses road markings, and if that fails, uses the
car in front to stay in its lane.

00:05:52 SPK_2
In addition, there is an assisted lane change function where the driver can use the indicator,
and if it's safe, the autopilot will move the car into a parallel lane. If the car doesn't have
sufficient information to operate these functions, the autopilot will disengage to give control
back to the driver.

00:06:14 SPK_2
So that's autopilot. A self driving car, like the Google car, is designed to travel and
manoeuvre autonomously through the environment, making decisions on its own about
where to go and how to navigate with other drivers on the road.

00:06:34 SPK_2
However, the Google car can only drive around areas that Google has carefully mapped. A
Google car is still not fully autonomous though, because human monitoring is required.

00:06:49 SPK_1
Thanks, you've made that clear. So let's go back to your point about the road being a social
space and the role that communication plays in driving.

00:06:58 SPK_2
Okay, we found two main types of communication. First, communication between the car
and the driver.

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And second, between the car and other drivers on the road. A striking feature of many of the
videos we analyzed is that they show cars being manoeuvred with no hands on the steering
wheel.

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However, assisted driving is certainly not completely hands free. What was kind of unusual,
and I don't really know what to make of this, is that in our data, drivers would be
continually changing the target speed of the car or the distance it would leave to the car in
other.

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In front. In other words, there was a continual monitoring of what the car was doing on the
road by the driver.

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And why would they do that?

00:07:50 SPK_2
Well, they would do this because at least with the current generation of systems, if you don't
watch what the car is going to do, things can go terribly wrong. One example we saw was of
a driver reporting at some length on, on how the autopilot thinks.
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He described lurches the car makes when it drives past different exit lanes it's unsure about.
In the past, the autopilot has moved towards exiting where it wasn't supposed to.

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And so now the driver is prepared to intervene. He learned actually to detect the autopilot's
exit move at its first sign of movement and was ready to force the car to stay in the correct
lane.

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So rather than handing over full control to the car, drivers on autopilot appear to learn to co
drive and intervene in order to prevent common autopilot mistakes. Co driving with an
autopilot requires monitoring the movement of the car and watching the dashboard.

00:08:55 SPK_2
For instances when the autopilot has kind of lost its way. Drivers have to learn how much
monitoring the autopilot needs to identify the troubles that occur when an imperfect
technology is being used in the real world.

00:09:12 SPK_1
So if cars make these types of mistakes with road markings, what happens when they
interact with other cars and other drivers?

00:09:20 SPK_2
Well, we first have to acknowledge that much of the Tesla's autopilot driving is actually
incident free. The car remains in the lane correctly with cars moving around it.

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However, in our data set, we did find occasions where the Tesla caused troubles in traffic.
And I'll give you an example here.

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Related to lane changing. Now, we all probably learned that when we're driving on a
motorway, it's good manners to move over when we see another vehicle trying to merge
onto the motorway from a slip road.

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One of our videos captured the interactions between a car where the driver was using the
assisted lane change function to move over for a vehicle merging and another car that was
already in the lane that the driver wanted to move into. So our Tesla driver indicated
because he wanted his car to move over to the next lane, so the driver of the car behind him,
who's already in that lane, slows down and waits and offers a space for the Tesla to move
over.

00:10:33 SPK_2
Now, of course, the Tesla car has no awareness of this kind of social behaviour on the road.
It's essentially just tracking where the cars are on the road and it doesn't see that slowing
down is actually an offer to move over.

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The Tesla doesn't move over, so the car behind continues until it's approaching the back of
the Tesla. And at this point, as the car continues, the Tesla actually decides then to move
over and in fact cuts up the other driver, you know, causes that driver to take quick action.

00:11:10 SPK_2
And then you can hear our driver make a comment about how the other driver didn't look
too pleased about that maneuver.

00:11:18 SPK_1
Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

00:11:20 SPK_2
Exactly. So you can see that there's been a bit of social interaction on the road that the Tesla
just couldn't see.

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With limited access to the traffic situation, we can't expect the autopilot to recognize the
offer at all, whether it was considerate or whatever it was, and it's delay in moving over as
marking that it had declined the offer and then its abrupt lane shift as potentially upsetting
the driver of the other car.

00:11:51 SPK_1
So I like this idea of the thinking about the road as a social space. I remember when my dad
taught me how to drive.

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One of the first things he said is that the thing that differentiates the learner or new driver
from the experienced driver is the ability to interpret the intent of other drivers on the road.

00:12:10 SPK_2
Yeah, the point I want to make is that developers of self driving cars need to consider that
driving does involve social norms. They can't just think about the technical aspects of
manoeuvring the cars on the road to get to a destination, because even though they can't
recognise it, autopilots are in fact interacting in a social situation with other drivers.
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They're signalling intent, they're making offers and they're signalling even more complex
aspects. Aspects like being aggressive or rude or polite.

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Most of the time, autopilots produce safe and reliable driving, but what we do need to think
about is when they fail to recognise and display these social features of driving in traffic.
And this causes problems.

00:13:00 SPK_1
Well, Erika, it's been really interesting hearing about the challenges that drivers with
autopilots experience on real world roads. If there is this much trouble with other cars, then
I can only imagine the challenges that pedestrians must pose.

00:13:13 SPK_2
Yeah, everything that's been said about social norms for road use can also be applied to
interactions between cars and pedestrians. So, going back to your opening question, I think
it will be some time before we see cities designed around sea cabs.

00:13:29 SPK_2
Before we can get to that point, developers first have to navigate the transitional phase.
Phase, I'm sorry, where roads are shared by autonomous vehicles and human drivers.

00:13:43 SPK_1
Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you, Erica.

00:13:46 SPK_1
It's been a pleasure and thank you all for listening. If you want to learn more about Erica's
research, then please go to the car and driver website.