For all of you that haven’t heard we are now mostly Facebook based. Recently we’ve given admin status on Facebook to a few members of our community and they have been updating the page with a variety of interesting links. This post is for those of you still following on twitter or an RSS reader so you don’t miss out.

The big news is that self driving cars are now legal in California!

An inside look into the California self driving legislation.

Meanwhile Washington DC may be next to legalise autonomous vehicles.

Questions as to whether Google will make money out of self driving cars. For the record, we think so though mostly via technology licencing which is not really covered in this article.

There’s also an article up at Traffic Technology International about self driving cars (Page 42 onwards).

Linux is working on an automotive Operating System. In other news Tesla will be updating the OS of their model S via WiFi.

Thanks to Chris Law, Paul Godsmark, Gabriel and Matt for all the links this week.

An article over at bezinga.com  has posted 3 reasons why Google’s Self Driving Car will be a failure for the company.

To summarise the article:

1. China hates the Google, and the Chinese want to drive their cars.
2. Insurance Issues.
3. Self Driving cars are too expensive.

1) In all honesty, point #1 doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if the Chinese ban Google’s self driving technology, Google still has a target market of 6 billion people.

The author of the piece seems to think that the US won’t follow the lead of California and Nevada because Californian politics is weird and the rest of the country won’t follow what California does. I disagree, states will embrace autonomous technology because they want to get ahead in the technology game and are afraid of being left behind. Maybe some states will resist, but with Florida and Hawaii also considering driverless technology the rest of the world will have multiple templates of self-driving car legislation to copy. Also, self driving technology will be a big issue for the disabled and the elderly and those folks vote and will most likely not be happy with anyone who blocks the legalisation of this technology.

2) Liability is a big issue, as the author of the piece writes:

if major carriers decide the manufacturer will be to blame in fender benders involving these cars, there is one great reason for the manufacturer to not pursue the self-driving car dream.

I think there is a good chance this issue will be resolved. We (re)posted recently on some suggestions on how to tackle liability issues. The idea is that self driving cars will be very safe, but for the times when there is a catastrophe we can create a fund – like a vaccine injury scheme. This fund could be financed by a levy on ticket prices, self driving car profits or general tax revenue. Victims are duly compensated when ‘shit happens’ but companies aren’t unjustly sued for negligence.

3) Self driving cars are rather expensive. No doubt about this. However, if you look at Rio Tinto, they are deploying self driving trucks and trains partly because of high salaries paid to drivers. In other words, even though this technology is expensive, in cases it is already cheaper to use. That said, the original point that Google’s autonomous vehicles will flop is a bit absurd. Look at so many other technological products like computers, genome sequencing or even solar panels, prices start high but get rapidly cheaper.

Ok, that’s me done, if you have some time, read the original article and let us know what you think.

As we’ve reported a while back legal issues and liability could be big issues regarding driverless cars. For some interesting thoughts on legislation you should check out Bryant W Smith’s blog post on who actually drives a driverless vehicle.

Here I’m going to quickly summarise a few scenarios on how to handle liability when a driverless car crashes and kills someone.

1. Socialised Catastrophic Insurance. 

This idea is similar to vaccine compensation schemes in various countries. Vaccines are great for public health, save lives, reduce disease related injury and are generally safe and well tolerated. However, there is a tiny chance (say, 1 in a million) that receiving a vaccine could kill or permanently disable the recipient. To account for this outcome, injuries from vaccines – particularly childhood vaccines – can be compensated. Caps on the payout and thresholds for the degree of disability are features of these schemes, which are funded from vaccine revenues.

Driverless cars in 10 or 15 years could be analogous to the vaccine example in that riding in a driverless car could pose very little risk to the individual. However, at some point an accident will happen and someone will be killed or injured. To compensate victims or their families the fund would award money for damages. The fund would likely be supported by revenues from selling driverless cars or by taxpayers.

The upside of this system is that car makers and programmers don’t have to over-engineer their products to be highly expensive and completely flawless to the point of paranoia. The downside is the same as the upside: should car makers and programmers not  have to engineer their products to be flawless because they won’t be liable, there is less incentive to make the perfect product.

2. Caveat emptor - Owner Liability.

Basically this scenario is ‘Buyer Beware’. Legislation could be organised so that car makers are not liable for driverless car behaviour. As a result whoever buys a driverless car is taking responsibility as the driver of the car – solely taking the risks and responsibilities upon themselves should an accident happen, with legislation requiring all driverless car owners to possess the appropriate insurance.

The upside again is that its great for car makers. The downside is that driverless car technology seems a bit pointless if you crash your car and get sued by whomever you’ve run over or crashed into because someone at Ford or Google didn’t debug their software properly.

3. Caveat venditor - Seller Liability. 

A far more likely scenario than #2 scenario of buyer liability and is probably the default legal setting in most countries today. This scenario is that not programming or constructing a driverless car properly is a form of tort. That is if a driverless car crashes due to manufacturing or programming error the manufacturer is liable.

The upside is that it really encourages car makers to be extremely rigorous in making their driverless cars. The downside is that car makers can get their programming right in 99.9% of situations but could still lose a lot of money in the 0.1% of situations they didn’t (or couldn’t plan for).

4. Travel insurance

This scenario is somewhat of a cross between 1 and 2 but instead of the cost being carried by society or one individual driver the cost is spread out by everyone using driverless cars. Its probably a more likely scenario if no-one owns driverless cars but we treat them as ubiquitously available taxis. The idea is that travel insurance would be charged as part of the taxi fare. If an accident occurred and the occupant was killed or injured the insurance company would pay out. Presumably caps and thresholds would also apply. Presumably the insurance companies would launch an investigation, if the owner* or manufacturer of the driverless taxi was negligent then they would also have to reimburse the insurance companies.

The upside is that this option could still be combined or augmented with option #1 of socialising increasingly rare catastrophic accidents. It also incentivises car makers to make less risky cars and continually debug their software as safer cars will attract lower insurance premiums. The downside is that travel insurance may be complicated and difficult to implement whilst also making driverless taxis less economical.

*Logically, taxi owners would also insure their driverless vehicles and keep them in good condition to avoid negligence claims and ensure payouts.

Several Links for your weekend reading:

Currently an online poll at Canadian website cbc.ca is showing 62% of respondents in favour of self driving cars.

Brad Templeton has an article up at Forbes comparing High Speed Rail to self driving cars and how both might integrate with futuristic air travel. (Hat Tip to Thom Landon for both links).

Meanwhile College Humor does a parody of Google X including the self driving car program (Thanks to Paul Godsmark).

Expert Members of IEEE think that 75% of cars will be self driving by 2040 (Thanks to Gabriel).

This next link (whilst not specifically on self driving cars) has an interesting look at the pros and cons of robotic parking.

An article at Business Insider says Google’s self driving cars may be more expensive than Ferrari’s but suggests ways to bring down the costs.

Nearly 90% of surveyed drivers want driver assist technologies but only 39% would be happy with a self driving car*, at least according to the Detroit News. Interestingly, the article notes:

99 percent of those surveyed considered themselves “good” drivers.

Enjoy your weekend!

*39% seems quite encouraging for a relatively untested technology that is still a ways off…

Chinese car maker BYD has developed a remote controlled car called the Su Rui. The car apparently drives itself at a max speed of 1.2 miles per hour (1.9 km per hour).

While the US is leading the world in developing self driving technology, I can’t help wonder if China or another nation will start selling them en masse first. In the West we are becoming more and more risk averse, products need to be more than 99.9% safe for us to feel comfortable. I wonder if legalisation will happen in the next few years in nations like China where road deaths are quite high (between 90-220,000 deaths per year in China depending on the source of the statistics). If public backlash isn’t a (huge) problem for a dictatorship but congestion, pollution and fatalities are then driverless technology, even if it is only 99% safe might have more pros than cons for legalising the technology.

A fairly comprehensive review of the driverless car story is up at The Economist. Its a nice read, of interest were a couple of sections:

The addition of autonomous control need not add much to the cost. An extra $3,000 or so should cover it, Mr Coelingh believes. And there is evidence that drivers are prepared to pay for add-ons that improve safety as well as convenience. Volvo already sells a popular driver-assistance option called City Safety for around $2,000, for example. It slams on the brakes if a distance-measuring laser or camera detects a vehicle or pedestrian in the car’s path. City Safety can prevent collisions completely at speeds of up to 30kph (18mph), and at higher speeds it softens the impact. A similar braking system on Mercedes-Benz vehicles has reduced insurance claims for bodily injury by roughly a sixth, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute, an American research group.

Also:

Vehicle-control software remains “fairly hackable”, says David Zuby, chief researcher at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an American industry body. Unless protocols for vehicle-to-vehicle communication are robust and secure, attackers could cause chaos by making cars crash into each other. John Simpson, a privacy advocate at Consumer Watchdog, a California lobby group, is concerned that Google is not so much teaching computers to drive as it is pioneering a nightmarish form of advertising. Google might be tempted, for a fee, to favour routes that lead past its advertisers. He presented his case in June in testimony to the transportation committee of California’s state assembly.

California looks like it will soon empower its DMV to regulate autonomous vehicles. I’m wondering… is this bill passing a bigger deal than Nevada and Florida legalising driverless vehicles? It feels like this will result in a bigger shift in the positive perception of autonomous technology and more momentum for other states to do the same thing.

So a question to our US readers: Is California a bellwether state in regards to the rest of American (and the world) taking up this technology?

From Next Big Future. An IEEE paper predicts that if cars were equipped with Vehicle to Vehicle communications as well as external sensors then highways could increase their capacity by 273%. I.e. that vehicles with these technologies can travel faster but closer together.

The article also notes that modelling done by the California PATH program suggests that platooning can increase highway utilisation by up to 400% depending on the platoon length, speed and inter vehicle distance. Edit: Admittedly though I can’t find the 400% figure in the PATH presentation.

Our Event Calendar has been updated.

Currently our only listed event is “Self Driving Cars, Neighborhood Electrics and Future Auto Mobility” on the 18th of September in California, USA.

If you have any events you would like us to list please shoot us an email.

There is a discussion piece over at the Huffington Post on the various policy and legal challenges facing autonomous vehicles becoming legal in the US. As an aside the author of the blog post wrote ’Aging America and Transportation: Personal Choices and Public Policy‘ (basically a book on mobility and transport for the Baby Boomer generation).

While the article is comprehensive it mostly goes over the same issues dedicated readers of this site know well. The author raises one interesting point though:

New infrastructure: Who will blink first: the government or vehicle manufacturers? If the slow move toward determining who pays, builds, and manages an electric vehicle or natural gas vehicle infrastructure is any indication of the speed with which public and private institutions can reach consensus, imagine how long it may take to adapt today’s driver-centered system to tomorrow’s autonomous system? How will a highway system in transition, shared between robots and humans, be operated? (What would the road signs look like for a road accommodating passenger cars, commercial traffic, bicycles, and robots?) Who will manage it? Will the existing, primarily private, infrastructure of vehicle fueling and maintenance be converted or see another set of providers emerge?

I think though the regulatory bodies in the US (as I noted in my previous post) seem to be hard at work ironing out how driverless technology will work. In terms of getting legislation passed Nevada and Florida have already enacted autonomous vehicle laws and California looks set to follow. In other words driverless technology has been legalised in multiple jurisdictions well before it is even commercially available and provides a template for other states and countries to follow. While there may be reasons to be pessimistic, there are far more reasons to be optimistic!

Edit: Thanks to Paul Godsmark for the link to this article.