Are We Ready for Driverless Cars?
Yesterday the American Automobile Association released a study on drivers who fall asleep behind the wheel. And what would a new study be without some statistics and bullet points? (Answer: This Washington Post story.) Let’s stick with statistics and bullet points:
- 41 percent of drivers have fallen asleep behind the wheel at some point in their lives.*
- Between 1999 and 2008, roughly 13 percent of crashes in the United States that resulted in a person being admitted to a hospital involved a drowsy driver.
- During that same period, 16.5 percent of fatal crashes involved a drowsy driver.
- In a A.A.A. survey, nearly 27 percent of people admitted that during the past month they drove despite being “so sleepy that they had a hard time keeping their eyes open.”
What that last figure shows is that 27 percent of Americans might benefit from a driverless car (if not a brain transplant).
Automated cars have made lots of news of late. Last month an unmanned, electric van completed an extraordinary three-month, 8,000-mile excursion through Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and the Gobi desert. Google recently announcedthat its fleet of seven driverless cars has logged 140,000 driverless miles in California—cruising down Lombard Street, crossing the Golden Gate bridge, even circumnavigating Lake Tahoe. The Department of Transportation has sponsored a $49 million effort called IntelliDrive to research vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
As I found out a few years ago, when writing about autonomous cars for Smithsonian.com, the idea dates back thousands of years to the ancient Chinese, who invented a two-wheeled, driverless chariot with a figure on top that always pointed south. In the 1970s the Stanford Research Institute developed “Shakey,” often considered the first artificially intelligent vehicle. Shakey used a television camera to observe its surroundings, then processed the images for an hour behind deciding how to advance.
More recent efforts use a technological cocktail of cameras, sensors, wireless communication, and G.P.S. systems to find their way. But while the success of automated cars has risen greatly in the past decade—thanks in large part toDARPA’s “Urban Challenge”—many obstacles remain. While driverless cars can handle basic traffic, for instance, they would have a tough time navigating the darting pedestrians and stop-and-go drivers on urban streets.
Interestingly, according to this report by Marketplace, one of the biggest challenges to driverless cars is human acceptance. It turns out drivers don’t like it when their cars tell them what to do. I can’t blame them too much—I don’t like being woken up either.
* I wonder if Rush Limbaugh, who feels the right to talk on your cell phone while driving should be an “unlimited freedom,” feels the same about the right to sleep at the wheel.
