- 4 June 2012
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What’s In A Name? Coining The Driverless Revolution
4 June 2012 Posted By matthewn
Since starting this blog, we have seen quite a few different names bandied about for autonomous vehicles:
Whistle Cars and Robo Cars have been names promoted by Brad Templeton.
Apeless Carriage is the idea of reader Lars and the name of his new blog.
Autonome is a word proposed by reader Paul Godsmark.
The most common terms we see around the internet are (with “vehicles” being a substitute for “cars”):
Self Driving Cars
Driverless Cars
Autonomous Cars
When deciding what to call this blog, we chose to use the name Driverless Car HQ for these reasons:
1. We don’t believe in fighting against the grain of popular usage trends. To do so is basically impossible.
2. The Google concept is called the Google Driverless Car Program. Given that they dominate the news for this industry with their program, there’s every chance that this is the term that will be popularly accepted.
3. Self-Driving Cars may statistically be the most used term in searches, but Self Driving Car HQ doesn’t quite have the same ring.
4. We felt the term autonomous vehicle is less accessible and will most likely be used in legislation only as opposed to popular usage. However, that being said, if Google had used the word autonomous we probably would have fallen in line.
5. To coin our own term only serves to heighten confusion. For the sake of discussion on the internet including blogs, Twitter and Facebook it can fragment the conversation to have multiple terms being used interchangeably.
Obviously we have now invested a fair amount of time and because of this would now prefer the term Driverless Car to transfer into common parlance.
If another term does become popular, we will use this. We are smart enough to follow the winds of change. At the same time, we won’t start using terms “just because” as this will only serve to create confusion and ambiguity.
What is your opinion? Are we wrong?
*edit – reader Mohammad P points out that “*Google program is named “Self-Driving”, not “Driverless”. Further investigation proves him correct!
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23 Responses to “What’s In A Name? Coining The Driverless Revolution”
Apple’s iCar… I wouldn’t put it past them to make one
I really hope they do.
Even though I don’t like Apple! Then again, I don’t like Google either and I’m busy pumping up their driverless car program – Mat
I just see computers as tools. I never really got into the whole rivalry thing. One is a wrench, and the other is a screwdriver – or other tool. If a Mac can do something a PC can’t – and vice versa – then they just serve their purposes. I’m just as comfortable working on both systems. Regarding Google, they’ve got the best chance – if the automotive industry doesn’t outright steal their ideas. I would like to see them make the public even more aware of their efforts. I suspect within the coming months, we’ll be seeing more about “the driverless car.”
I don’t like them because they are hyper litigious, it has nothing to do with their products. Regarding Google, they seem to be doing well in garnering interest so the next year will be exciting indeed.
Yeah, I understand your feelings about them. It appears that other companies may be trying to steal their thunder by rolling out products before Apple, i.e., they’ve caught on to Apple’s marketing tactics. Google should present their vehicles on highly rated television programs (either on cable or broadcast networks), and perhaps get some kind of celebrity endorsement, e.g. Jay Leno (of the Tonight Show), or Top Gear. I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
I’m looking forward to both Apple and Google’s roll-out (no pun intended) of their new maps (mapping products).
While i think your working terminology is entirely reasonable, it does strike me that it’s rather analogous to “homeless carriage”. it’s also a bit unwieldy.
I think a shorter slang term will emerge over time. in the longer term i wonder whether we’ll just call driverless cars “cars” as all cars will be fitted with the technology anyway.
@Robert Merkel I’ve often wondered if people will start calling them by their abbreviations e.g. DC’s or AV’s?
But I agree we will probably just call them cars. Cell phones are probably a good predictor of this. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years people have started calling mobile (cell) phones just ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ or ‘cell’ (depending on what country you live in).
Robert in the long term I would have to say you’re right. DC can also work and I can definitely envisage us using that sort of terminology.
DC would be most likely end up being a fanboi kind of term that would meet with confusion outside of our world.
* Correction: Google program is named “Self-Driving”, not “Driverless”.
FYI, at SAE we are working to define these terms. There is also a similar thing going on with TRB to define the terms and there will be a workshop coming up on July 26th in CA.
Really? I was convinced that they called it Driverless. That’s my imagination for you. – Mat
Mohammad Poorsartep, any more details on this workshop? We could post on it – Mat
Here is a pic to put your imagination at ease
http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/google-driverless-car.jpg?w=600&h=400&crop=1
And this is the webpage for TRB workshop .. We are still in the planing stage but lots of pieces are in place.
http://www.cvent.com/events/future-of-road-vehicle-automation/event-summary-6c758cae99b84769ba3d139717197574.aspx
Hehe yes I just found the pic before you posted it and have now updated the post – Mat
The reason why I wanted to draw your attention to this was not to be a nit-picker .. There are really subtle differences between these terms. Each one of these terms imply a different set of capabilities.
Blog post now up Mohammad – Mat. If you or anyone else could provide a write-up afterwards we would be immensely grateful
No problems, I get you. – Mat
Car+
iJeeves
Automoto (now that Google owns Motorola)
Droidmobile
G-Ride (DUB Edition for the ‘urban’ crowd)
Chromobile
These are all tongue-in-cheek-terrible. ‘Driverless Car’ is peerless. It has won before the battle’s begun.
To Chumpel, the abbreviating has begun: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/05/30/will-driverless-cars-cut-your-insurance80-percent
@Chumpai @Robert Merkel @TheMechanicalJerk
First, it seems that the name of the technology will be directly related to how it is first used. If UPS fleets adopt first, then how does that effect how the technology is described? If taxi-alternatives use autonomous technology, will it differ? I think the answer is yes.
Adoption, technology and obviously the company dictating it’s TRADEMARK will define (initially) the words and their usage.
So focusing on Google is smart, but they’ll have a name like Google Drive. So we might all be GD’ing or GDriving. Looking at their naming convention might allow us to divine a first adopter. Anyone else further along than Google?
How about direct drive? Robodrive? Sensodrive? Sensordrive? I think it will be something that sounds safe. What does that mean? It will focus on what it does really well.
The focus will be on safety and security, not on robots. Of this I feel confident. Safetydrive? Quantumdrive? Securedrive?
The Google project has never been called the Google driverless car project. There is a wikipedia page with that name, but the name was thought up by whoever happened to edit wikipedia on that topic. In general, sorry to say while you have a nice blog, that name is probably going away. All the industry folks at the “Driverless Car” summit, and I mean effectively all of them, voted against it in the polls they did during the conference. As such I suspect that summit will have a new name next year.
The word robocars is not my invention. It’s used fairly commonly (though less often than self-driving car) and was, among other uses, the title of a TV series on the Science Channel about the 2007 Darpa Grand Challenge. I decided to use that name after asking various developers of the cars what they called their system. The most common answers were “the car” and “the robot.” The term whistlecar (for a car you can summon) is indeed my coinage, as is deliverbot and a couple of other terms.
Probably the next most common term I see is “autonomous vehicle.” The acronym, AV, is too heavily overloaded. All these terms (except robocar, I judged) are too unwieldy for a popular name, and if the world settles on self-driving car, it will probably end up as SDC to most folks.
I actually like the name I chose a little less these days. We’re moving away from it being thought of as robotics. And at the same time, I believe that the full door-to-door runs-empty robocar is so different from its predecessor as to not even be a “car.” In that sense, self-driving car is like horseless carriage — a name borrowed from the older technology that will wither. I toyed with Driverless Carriage (after call, car comes from carriage) a bit but as noted, just about everybody hates driverless.
One other reason I dislike driverless is that, like you, I have a news search going for stories on the tech, but a lot of the times when it matches driverless car, it’s a story like, “After the driver was ejected, the driverless car careened over the median into oncoming traffic.” Not the image anybody likes.
To top it all off, we have several types of technology for the public to accept names on. The Cadillac “super cruise” — which may not be a trademark as it is somewhat generic is one level and the “read a book” Google car is another. The “drive empty” car is at the top of the pile.
@bradtem Hi Brad, thanks for stopping by! Thought we’d never see you around here.. I’ll respond point by point. Thanks for the positive comments
- Google Driverless Car – you’re right, we stuffed up on that.. and a reader pointed it out to us. I left the mistake there to show that we’re all human. In terms of the summit, shame we missed it but we’re on the opposite side of the globe!
- Robo car.. I said you promoted the term because I was unsure if you coined it or not..
- Yeh you’re right, Driverless is a pain in the ass with all the news stories about runaway cars
We’re happy to follow the wind on this one. I’ve never been interested in coining terms (or trying to) and we generally don’t want to encourage others to do the same because it just leads to confusion.
As soon as something takes hold, it will be SEO suicide for us to resist it.
@MatthewNewton @bradtem ’Robocar’ certainly rolls off the tongue better than ‘driverless car’. I do like the acronym SDC and sections of the media is starting to use ‘self driving car’ more often.
One more point on this topic, for cars that are truly driverless (I.e. drones with no driver or pilot seat). I would hazard a guess that we will use military lexicon like ‘Unmanned Ground Vehicle’ as opposed to ‘driverless car’.