There was much reporting recently on the safe passage through the California Senate of Driverless Car legislation.

It’s been a smooth ride to this point with legislatures largely giving a painless passage.

As with all innovation, however, there will always be someone popping up to get their piece of attention from the media and in this case it’s Consumer Watchdog, a California-based consumer advocacy group. Here’s what they have to say:

“Without appropriate regulations, Google’s vehicles will be able to gather unprecedented amounts of information about the use of those vehicles. How will it be used? Just as Google tracks us around the Information Superhighway, it will now be looking over our shoulders on every highway and byway.”

They go on to lay out the basis of their concerns:

However, when it comes to its operations and plans it is a black box. We believe Google’s actions demonstrate that it cannot be taken at its word. Consider the Wi-Spy scandal, the largest wiretapping effort ever, in which Google’s Street View cars sucked up emails, passwords and other data from private Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries around the world… Google kept changing its story and still has not come clean. The FCC fined the company $25,000 for obstructing its investigation of the incident. Google initially said the wire-tapping was the job of a rogue engineer but the FCC has found that, in fact, the company was well aware of the ongoing Wi-Spying activity.

Their worries are a bit on the premature side given the vehicles are for testing, however they are correct in saying that Google has demonstrated a fairly cavalier attitude towards privacy concerns in the past. The founders of Google are notorious in some quarters for not even believing that people would ever be concerned with all their data being hoovered up.

The territory is a bit different for Google here with the auto industry much more tightly regulated than the internet. They seem to understand that though, given their extensive lobbying efforts.

Here at DriverlessCarHQ we think that autonomous vehicles will probably make a lot of public transport obsolete. We’ve speculated that in a couple of decades trains and train tracks may go the way of the dodo. In fact, a while back we posted on how driverless cars are already affecting debates on whether to build new rail lines. We think this because commuters begrudgingly put up with trains with other people because they have to. If a cheaper, more private alternative like a driverless taxi comes along then we expect commuters to abandon trains in favour of driverless cars.

All that being said, a few other posts have appeared around the blogosphere that generally agree with the basic premise but point out there are more complicated factors. Matt Yglesias makes the point:

 rail already suffered mightily at the invention of the conventional automobile.

So presumably, driverless cars will affect rail even more. However, Yglesias also notes that driverless cars will make car parks much more obsolete also, train stations with large car parks could presumably convert these into high rises:

Commuter rail stations, for example, will no longer need to choose between park-and-ride and transit-oriented development models. Every station will be a little TOD neighborhood, and people from further away will get dropped off and picked up at the station without needing to worry about storing a car there.

In other words, thanks to driverless cars, trains for some commuters may become more convenient. Timothy Lee over at Forbes writes a post in response to Yglesias’s and generally agrees with him but thinks the future of public transport will be a ‘horses for courses’ scenario:

In smaller metro areas, self-driving cars will likely make recently-built light rail systems look even more like white elephants, as the falling cost of taxi service and the reduction in congestion causes many rail customers to switch to them. As self-driving taxis become affordable even for poor commuters, smaller metro areas are likely to become even more car-focused and sprawling than they already are.

On the other hand, in larger metro areas the emergence of affordable taxi service may actually increase subway ridership, as more suburban residents take a taxi to their local subway stop and ride to work in the central business district. Indeed, the greater efficiency of self-driving transportation has the potential to dramatically increase the size and density of our largest cities. And that will make the rail transit systems of large cities like New York and Chicago more essential than ever.

Having always lived in the suburbs I have less sympathy with the idea that driverless cars will increase rail use, though I can see how that may occur initially at least. I still think that the economics and convenience of a driverless taxi will eventually be far more attractive than taking the train, and as I said at the top of the post, commuters don’t love public transport, they tolerate it.

I’m interested in your thoughts?

Bryant Walker Smith has put up a thoughtful post titled ‘Planning For Autonomous Driving’.  Bryant addresses a few topics:

1) How driverless cars could affect planning for physical Infrastructure.

2) How driverless cars could affect digital infrastructure.

3) Should governments mandate current vehicles to be compatible with aspects driverless technology?

With regards to point #1 both Mat and I think that a lot of current public transport infrastructure like train lines may become obsolete within a few decades if driverless taxis become widespread.

In regards to point #3  Bryant makes a very good point that sometimes regulators can get ahead of themselves when it comes to private transportation (bio-ethanol being the prime example of bad policy). I imagine at some point there may have to be a degree of standardisation in driverless car manufacturing, but for now better to take a hands off approach.

Edit: If you’re interested in discussing the topic further it would be great if you could head over to his blog and let him know what you think.

A small group of Indian students have built a driverless golf buggy that can be controlled by mobile phone. I suspect their might be a couple of entrepreneurs out there will read this story and think ‘Startup!’

(HT: Paul Godsmark)

www.indianshowbiz.com

Since 2009 Volvo and the European Commission have been working on an ‘autonomous platooning’ project called SATRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment). The is similar to a biker’s pelaton in the Tour de France, the first car (or more likely truck) acts as a windshield for other cars in the ‘platoon’ allowing them greater fuel efficiency. In theory, cars could join a platoon on the highway and hand over control of their vehicle to the platoon’s AI – effectively making the car driverless for the duration of the trip. Last year the project announced they had successfully tested their road trains.

In the past couple of days the media has reported the project has been testing the road trains in busy Spanish roads, covering up to 200km per day and experimenting with different distances of up to 15 metres (49 feet) between cars in the platoon.

HT: Gabriel for the gizmag.com link.

sartre-project.org

http://www.politicalcartoons.com

By Mike Keefe at political cartoons.com. Thanks for Gabrielle for posting this on our facebook page.

A short article at psfk.com has listed some of the driver assist technologies packaged with the 2013 Ford Fusion. The features seem to build on current Ford technology which includes cruise control and driverless parallel parking technology (which I was surprised to find has been around since 2009ish) but will also include anti-drift, lane keeping and blind spot warning technology.

I’m particularly encouraged by seeing lane keeping technology. Driverless cars will be heavily dependent on proper lane keeping technology, so seeing the technology in current models makes me think the technology is quite robust, but also in the next 5-10 years before driverless cars are widespread there will be time to see how this technology works in the real world.

www.psfk.com

New Research by the USA’s Department of Transports shows 92% of drivers would like Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) crash avoidance technology in their cars, but aren’t willing to pay more than $250 for the technology. The full results are available via pdf from the NHTSA website.

Drivers feeling comfortable delegating a part of their driving to V2V detection and avoidance systems is a good step forward in society at large feeling more comfortable with the concept of driverless vehicles. On another note, while drivers don’t seem willing to pay to have V2V to be installed in their current vehicles, these features are likely to be included as standard in newer models, and I suspect consumers will want features such V2V along with course correction, Web 2.0 interactivity and all the other technological bells and whistles.

www.nhtsa.com

(HT: @AUVSI)

There was an interesting discussion in Anthony’s post about car sharing schemes about car ownership and how stuck we are to our cars.

Commenter Huadpe argued that we were going too far with our thoughts on the potential of  TaaS. He is probably correct! However, this article just popped up in my feed that’s quite interesting.

Car Generation Dying Out says the headline:

Nationally, the number of kilometres driven by people younger than 35 dropped by 23 per cent between 2001 and 2009, according to research by the think tank Frontier Group.

More than a quarter of those in that age group don’t own a driver’s licence.

The study that Frontier Group released in April attributed the shift away from driving to several things, including a doubling of petrol prices since 2001 and the ability of people on buses and subways to stay plugged into their social network without feeling guilty about distracted driving.

23 per cent. That’s significant.

In bigger cities, however, congestion has stifled the sense of freedom drivers once found behind the wheel, says Timothy K. Gilbert, who chairs the automotive marketing department at Northwood University in Florida.

‘‘When you begin to look at the vehicle as more utilitarian you begin to look at alternatives, because it’s only a method of transportation,’’ he says.

‘‘The way people look at the automobile reflects maybe not uncertainty as much as ambivalence.’’
Is ambivalence the death of romance?

‘‘Are we really ever going to get over the love affair? I doubt it,’’ Marsden says. ‘‘Automotive culture, that love affair is a deep one. And we may have to compromise, we may have to shift, we may have to redefine it, but it’s a pull.

‘‘It’s a deep, deep pull.’’

We tend to avoid posting every single snippet in the media about the Google Driverless Car program… Otherwise we’d be posting about it 5 times a day.

However, today Marginal Revolution posted this link from KTVZ. It’s a great, detailed review of one man’s experience in the Driverless Car:

The drive was thrilling and fascinating because, come on, the car drives itself. In traffic! Disappointing because it’s clearly not going to be ready for public use for years and years.

For now, at least, the car only drives routes it’s been trained to drive. My ride in Washington DC was along a route that Google engineers had driven with the car earlier. Google refused to allow the car to be driven anywhere beyond this well-studied environment, at least not with the media tagging along.

Still, that doesn’t mean it was a cake walk.

No Google engineer taught the car that a bunch of kids on a field trip would march out in front of it at an intersection. It stopped and waited for them on its own. And no-one told it that, right after that, another car would run the four-way stop sign right in front of it. It handled that, too, avoiding a collision all on its own.

At first, those interactions seemed boringly normal to me until I remembered… no-one was driving! The car had done that all itself while the man in the driver’s seat sat passively watching.