Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes
as a six-year old boy named Falcon had gotten somehow trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest.
Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.
#At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car,
Long-time students head home from evening class in automated taxi pods, which can be called by mobile phone,
Henry ford s vision of the Sky Car is now here and the popular Aeromobil models can often be spotted over the capital,
reduced-pressure tube where pressurised capsules whisk passengers across Doha in seconds and throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council,
Many commuters travel to finance jobs in Dubai and Karachi or to oversee manufacturing in Iraq
AN AUTOMOTIVE REVOLUTION Commuting is transformed as self-driving vehicles eliminate accidents and free up time for leisure and work.
Audi, BMW, GM and Google tested them first. The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicted that autonomous cars would account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040.
holographic video conferencing reduces the need for frequent business travel. Cisco Telepresence was a frontrunner in this field.
and material science advances would reduce the typical passenger vehicle to around 90 kilograms in weight,
and worldwide Qatar is regarded as one of top destinations in the world for cultural, technological tourism, recreational choice, for work and the general happiness of its inhabitants.
The Qatari capital has made in fact the 10 of Mercer s Quality of Living Survey since 2029.
with weekly rocket flights departing to human colonies on the Moon and Mars (many of which use the same hydroponic food growing techniques perfected in Qatar) making it a truly intergalactic capital city.
#Google s self-driving car. Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights,
signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids.
and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.
The driver in the lane to my right. He s twisted halfway around in his seat,
taking a picture of the Lexus that I m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski.
Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour,
He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so.
By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road
His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas,
and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.
Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes,
But nowadays the vehicle is marked clearly:##oeself-Driving Car.##Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute.
He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o clock, waves goodbye to his fianc e and their son,
and drives to his office in Mountain view, forty-three miles away. The ride takes him over surface streets and freeways, old salt flats and pine-green foothills, across the gusty blue of San francisco bay,
and down into the heart of Silicon valley. In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours,
but Levandowski doesn t mind. He thinks of it as research. While other drivers are gawking at him
he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow,
and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is when there s roadwork
or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen:#
as the Lexus took us across the Dumbarton Bridge.##oethis is more like Charles Lindbergh s plane.
As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, #oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves,
an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company? We ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.#
#Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#
a self-driving car will save your life. The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction:
this year s model of last century s Make it belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs
and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology.
In 1939, at the World s Fair in New york, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General motors Futurama exhibit.
Inside, a conveyor belt carried them high above a miniature landscape, spread out beneath a glass dome.
Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio-guided cars.##oedoes it seem strange?
Skyscrapers and superhighways made the deadline, but driverless cars still putter along in prototype. Human beings, as it turns out,
A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes inside.#
#oeno traffic jam...no collisions...no driver fatigue.##From 1977: Engineers huddle around a driverless Ford on a test track.#
#oecars like this one may be on the nation s roads by the year 2000!##Levandowski shook his head.#
#oewe didn t come up with this idea, #he said.##oewe just got lucky that the computers
and sensors were ready for us.##Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps:
smart roads and smart cars. General motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties.
Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,
like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal
and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets,
alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car#oeslow down, sharp curve ahead.#
#Systems like these were fairly simple and reliable, but they had a chicken-and-egg problem.
#oewhy would we invest in putting wires in the road?##Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex.
They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,
then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was steering itself around a track.
By 1995, Dickmanns s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense,
Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were controlled strictly environments.
is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve.
And though Congress had set a goal that a third of all ground combat vehicles be autonomous by 2015,
build a car that can drive a hundred and forty-two miles without human intervention. Ernst Dickmanns s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn,
but always with a driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand Challenge would be empty,
and the road would be rough: from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways, it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns;
instead of road signs and lane lines, G. P. S. waypoints.##oetoday, we could do it in a few hours,
#Thrun told me.##oebut at the time it felt like going to the moon in sneakers.#
and recalled that her son used to play with remote-control cars as a boy, crashing them into things on his bedroom floor.
#darpa s rules were vague on the subject of vehicles: anything that could drive itself would do.
He would build the world s first autonomous motorcycle. This seemed like a stroke of genius at the time.
Tasked with building a machine that could shoot the most Ping-pong balls into a tube, the students came up with dozens of ingenious contraptions.
drop a ball into the tube, then cover it up so that no others could get in.
The motorcycle could be like that, Levandowski thought: quicker off the mark than a car and more maneuverable.
It could slip through tighter barriers and drive just as fast. Also, it was a good way to get back at his mother,
who d never let him ride motorcycles as a kid.##oefine,#he thought.##oei ll just make one that rides itself.#
a motorcycle can t stand up on its own. It needs a rider to balance it#r else a complex,
The other racers had no such problem. They also had substantial academic and corporate backing:
the Carnegie mellon team was working with General motors, Caltech with Northrop grumman, Ohio State with Oshkosh trucking.
He gradually scraped together thirty thousand dollars from Raytheon, Advanced micro devices, and others. No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project.
Then he added a hundred thousand dollars of his own. In the meantime, he went about poaching the faculty s graduate students.#
#oeshe hated the motorcycle project.##There came a day when Goldberg realized that half his Ph d. students had been working for Levandowski.
They d begun with a Yamaha dirt bike, made for a child, and stripped it down to its skeleton.
They added cameras, gyros, G. P. S. modules, computers, roll bars, and an electric motor to turn the wheel.
#bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over#ore than six hundred times in a row.#
#oewe built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark, #Smart told me.#
#oeit s like one of my colleagues once said:##You don t understand, Charlie, this is robotics.
Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.
When the bike tipped to one side, Krasnov had it steer ever so slightly in the same direction.
This created centrifugal acceleration that pulled the bike upright again. By doing this over and over, tracing tiny S-curves as it went,
the motorcycle could hold to a straight line. On the video clip from that day, the bike wobbles a little at first,
like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field#s if guided by an invisible hand.
Caltech s Chevy Tahoe crashed into a fence. Even the winner, Carnegie mellon, earned at best a Pyrrhic victory.
A helicopter later found it beached on an embankment, wreathed in smoke, its back wheels spinning so furiously that they d burst into flame.
As for the Ghost rider, it managed to beat out more than ninety cars in the qualifying round#mile
-and-a-half obstacle course on the California Speedway in Fontana. But that was its high-water mark.
the bike sputtered forward, rolled three feet, and fell over.##oethat was a dark day,
he let his car teach itself. Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks,
modelled on those in the brain. As he drove around Pittsburgh, they kept track of his driving decisions,
gathering statistics and formulating their own rules of the road.##oewhen we started, the car was going about two to four miles an hour along a path through a park#ou could ride a tricycle faster,
#Pomerleau told me.##oeby the end, it was going fifty-five miles per hour on highways.##In 1996, the car steered itself from Washington, D c,
. to San diego with only minimal intervention#early four times as far as Ernst Dickmanns s cars had gone a year earlier.#
#oeno Hands Across America,#Pomerleau called it. Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.
A self-taught car can come to some strange conclusions. It may confuse the shadow of a tree for the edge of the road,
or reflected headlights for lane markers. It may decide that a bag floating across a road is a solid object
and swerve to avoid it. It s like a baby in a stroller deducing the world from the faces and storefronts that flicker by.
It s hard to know what it knows.##oeneural networks are like black boxes, #Pomerleau says.#
particularly when they re controlling a two-ton vehicle.##Computers, like children, are taught more often by rote.
The roughest roads in the Grand Challenge were often the easiest to navigate, because they had clear paths and well-defined shoulders.
sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy.##oeput too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,
#Sebastian Thrun told me. The second Grand Challenge put these two approaches to the test.
Stanford with its puny Volkswagen Touareg, nicknamed Stanley. It was an even match. Both teams used similar sensors and software,
Rather than program the car with models of the rocks and bushes it should avoid,
The lasers on the roof scanned the area around the car, while the camera looked farther ahead.
the computer learned to identify the flat parts as road and the bumpy parts as shoulders.
Carnegie mellon, with two cars to Stanford s one, decided to play it safe. They had Highlander run at a fast clip#ore than twenty miles an hour on average#hile Sandstorm hung back a little.
Five cars finished the hundred-and-thirty-two-mile course; more than twenty cars went farther than the winner had in 2004.
In one year, they d made more progress than darpa s contractors had in twenty.#
I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks. So they were doing things in their home shops,
built a self-driving#oedoom Buggy#that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs.
A Ford S. U. V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley.
His motorcycle embodied that evolution. Although it never made it out of the semifinals of the second race#ripped up by some wooden boards#he Ghost rider had become, in its way,
Two years later, the Smithsonian added the motorcycle to its collection; a year after that, it added Stanley as well.
and a row of what look like clown bicycles parked out front, free for the taking. When you walk in,
and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates, #Brin said.##oeit s a huge tax on the land.#
#Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they re parked on the street or in driveways and garages.
But if cars could drive themselves, there would be need no for most people to own them.
A fleet of vehicles could operate as a personalized public-transportation system, picking people up and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls.
They d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis#y some calculations, they d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars#nd far more flexible than buses or subways.
Streets would clear highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland.##oewe re not trying to fit into an existing business model,
#Brin said.##oewe are just on such a different planet.##When Thrun and Levandowski first came to Google, in 2007,
they were given a simpler task: to create a virtual map of the country. The idea came from Larry page, the company s other cofounder.
Five years earlier, Page had strapped a video camera on his car and taken several hours of footage around the Bay Area.
Google engineers went on to jury-rig some vans with G. P. S . and rooftop cameras that could shoot in every direction.
Then they equipped a hundred cars and sent them all over the United states. Google street view has since spread to more than a hundred countries.
every logging road logged on a computer, every gravel drive driven down. Over the next two years, Levandowski shuttled back and forth to Hyderabad, India,
to train more than two thousand data processors to create new maps and fix old ones. When Apple s new mapping software failed so spectacularly a year ago,
Would he be interested in building a self-driving pizza delivery car? Within five weeks, he and a team of fellow Berkeley graduates and other engineers had re
On Wednesday, Amyris announced another milestone#a memorandum of understanding with Brazil s largest low-cost airline, GOL Linhas Aereas, to begin using a jet fuel produced by yeast starting in 2014.
such as local buses and Amyris s experiment with GOL s planes. But dozens of other products are close to market,
#Google s quest to popularize self-driving cars How a self-driving car sees the world.
At about 8am every morning, Anthony Levandowski gets into the driver s seat of his white Lexus for his daily commute to work.
He has a chauffeur and it s a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
By the time he points his car down the street, it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world.
But the moment Levandowski enters the freeway ramp near his house, a colorful graphic appears.
It s a schematic view of the road: two solid white vertical lines marking the boundaries of the highway
there are two on the far side of the freeway, shown in green on the schematic. Levandowski s car and those around him are represented by little white squares.
The graphics are reminiscent of Pong. But the game play? Pure Frogger. There are two buttons on Levandowski s steering wheel, off and on,
And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s
but three DARPA Grand Challenges, in 2004,2005, and 2007, jump-started the field. Grand Challenge alumni now populate self-driving laboratories worldwide.
but also most of the major car manufacturers: Audi, Volkswagen, Toyota, GM, Volvo, BMW, Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder.
It s the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski s car, and it s used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.
This year will mark another key milestone in self-driving technology. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is expected widely to announce standards
and mandates for car-borne beacons that will broadcast location information to other vehicles on the road.
The beacons will warn drivers when a collision seems imminent#hen the car ahead breaks hard,
for example, or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic. Automakers may then use this information to take the next step:
program automated responses. Levandoswki s commute is 45 miles long, and if Chauffeur were perfect,
he might use the time napping in the backseat. In reality, Levandowski has to stay awake and behind the wheel,
because when Chauffeur encounters a situation in which it s slightly unsure of itself, it asks him to retake control.
Following Google policy, Levandowski drives through residential roads and surface streets himself, while Chauffeur drives the freeways.
Still, it s a lot better than driving the whole way. Levandowski has his hands on the wheel for just 14 minutes of his hour-long commute:
at the very beginning, at the very end, and during the tricky freeway interchanges on the San mateo Bridge.
The rest of the time, he can relax.##oeautomatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself,
#he told automotive engineers attending the 2012 SAE International conference.##oewhen I arrive at work, I m ready.
He s the business lead of Google s self-driving-car project, an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Google has a small fleet of driverless cars now plying public roads. They are test vehicles,
but they are also simply doing their job: ferrying Google employees back and forth from work. Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars#asily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof#n average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500,000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year, where Governor Jerry brown signed California s self-driving-car bill into law, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said#oeyou
can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.##In other words, a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a#oeclick here to download#button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway, it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit, a litigious society,
and a host of technical catch-22 s. Right now, Chauffeur is undergoing what s known in Silicon valley as a closed beta test.
In the language particular to Google, the researchers are#oedogfooding#the car#riving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
It s not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
The company also wants to prove#n a statistical actuarial sense#hat the auto-drive function is safe:
not perfect, not crash-proof, but safer than a competent human driver.##oewe have a saying here at Google,
#says Levandowski.##oein God we trust#ll others must bring data.##Currently, the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will, on average,
travel 36,000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention. A mistake doesn t mean a crash#t just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees.
For example, it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road.
It s scary, but it s not the same thing as an accident. The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second.
Glitches occur about every 300 miles. This spring Chris Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D c,
. that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about.##oewe ve set the bar incredibly low,
#he says. For the errors worrisome enough to require human hands back on the wheel,
Google s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques#ncluding emergency braking, high-speed lane changes,
How many seconds of warning should Chauffeur provide before giving back the controls? The driver would need a bit of time to gather situational awareness,
#So far, Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google.
A self-driving car near Google s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago#he Stone age,
the car was not in self-driving mode at the time, so the accident wasn t Chauffeur s fault.
It was due to ordinary human error. Human drivers get into an accident of one sort or another an average of once every 500
the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
#Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009,
The attack came from Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit s Big Three automakers, in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
In the ad, the Charger is traveling through a long gloomy tunnel, the camera tracking with it.
#oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.#
#The voice-over is monotone, lifeless, ominous.##oewe ve seen that movie, #the voice intones.#
A year after the Dodge commercial aired, Levandowski showed up in Detroit as the keynote speaker at the SAE s annual shindig.
Google wants to make#oeavailable to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use,
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
automakers should focus on making the user experience their own. No one talks about the actual terms of the deal#egotiations with individual car companies were held behind closed doors#ut it shouldn t surprise anyone
if Google is proposing to give away the software. For the car companies, the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
the lidar. The acronym stands for light detection and ranging, and it works on the same principle that radar and sonar do#ut today s most advanced lidar is much more accurate,
generating up to 1. 3 million voxels per second. A voxel is like a pixel but represents a point in space instead of on a two-dimensional screen.)
But at $75, 000 to $85, 000 each, Google s lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined, including the car itself.
#oefor the autonomous vehicle, I m kind of the only thing that works,#Hall says. Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration.
Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask whether he could make a next-generation lidar#ruggedized, standardized automotive component.
The company wanted a design that it could hide (perhaps behind the windshield) that would wholesale for no more than $1, 000,
It would be many more years before a self-driving car is brought to market, prompting lidar orders in the hundreds of thousands.
the $100-million lidar order from a car company? Or the $100-million lidar factory by Velodyne or another supplier?
Self-driving cars should be achievable in five years. It takes more than five years to engineer a new car from the ground up.
If Detroit started designing self-driving cars now around components that actually exist, there s no way the technology could get to the showroom by 2017.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one, Levandowski says. So what s the plan?#
#oei don t think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body style to come out to build the technology,
#However, without reinventing Chauffeur and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it, Hall doesn t see the point.
It too is filled with catch-22 s. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker s analysis of self-driving-car technology.#
#Detroit doesn t want to start making self-driving cars without legal clarity. And legal clarity will not arrive until self-driving cars test the law.
Bryant Walker Smith, a civil engineer, lawyer, and Stanford Law school fellow, is the leading expert on how existing law would apply to self-driving cars.
His book-length legal analysis has more than 650 footnotes, but the title sums up the situation:#
#oeautomated Vehicles Are Probably Legal in the United states.##Probably. In Smith s analysis, the legal concept of#oedriver#goes back to an international agreement called the Geneva convention on Road Traffic,
ratified by Congress in 1950. In those days, many of the world s drivers still had reins and a whip instead of a wheel and pedals.
They drove teams of horses, herds of goats, drifts of sheep. Animals, Smith argues, are autonomous.
Thus, in the eyes of the law, an autonomous vehicle is arguably similar to a horse-drawn buggy.
And under the Geneva convention, a basic legal requirement for drivers#hether of animals or of cars#s the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work, the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
the person in the driver s seat. The Google car doesn t work without one,
as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10,20, or maybe even 30 seconds notice.
In Smith s analysis, the person behind the wheel satisfies the legal requirement of control#ut this theory hasn t been tested in court.
And even if self-driving cars do not violate an international treaty, myriad state laws imply that the driver must be human.
New york s vehicle code, for example, directs that#oeno person shall operate a motor vehicle without having at least one hand or
in the case of a physically handicapped person, at least one prosthetic device or aid on the steering mechanism at all times when the motor vehicle is in motion.#
#Computers don t have hands. That is a problem. Some states, prodded by Google lobbyists and looking to get ahead of the curve,
have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person either in the driver s seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
Nevada was the first to adapt the principle into state law: Its DMV even designed special license plates for the vehicles (they have an infinity sign.
California, Florida, and, most recently, the District of columbia have followed suit.##oewhat s going to happen, no matter what the law says,
is people are going to get sued,#Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows.
But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.##oethere wasn t legal protection for the Wright brothers
when they made that first plane, #he says.##oethey made them, they went out there,
and society eventually realized its value.##The oldest joke in the automotive world is the one about the loose nut between the gas pedal and the steering wheel.
There s one last hazard to engineer out of the modern car: human error, which according to NHTSA, is the#oecertain#cause of 81 percent of all car crashes.
Cars kill roughly 32,000 people a year in the U s, . and in 2010, Levandowski s life partner, Stefanie Olsen, was one of the 2. 2 million per year injured.
She was nine months pregnant at the time.##oemy son s name is Alex, and Alex almost was born never,
He credits the safety features engineered into the car#Prius#or saving Alex s life.
should prevent oblivious drivers from causing harm. Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts
when human hands leave the wheel. It s not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another,
so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning, in
which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system.
The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would at least in theory, enable all makes
and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver.
A 2012 IEEE study estimates that widespread adoption of autonomous-driving technology could increase highway capacity fivefold, simply by packing traffic closer together.
Peter Stone, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that intersecting streams of automated traffic will essentially flow through one another, controlled by a new piece of road infrastructure#he computerized intersection manager.
Average trip times across a typical city would be reduced dramatically.##oeand once you have these capabilities,
#says Stone, #oeall kinds of things become possible: dynamic lane reversals, micro-tolling to reduce congestion,
autonomous-software agents negotiating the travel route with other agents on a moment-to-moment basis
not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past, every stoplight would also be green.
In Volvo s real-world platooning tests, drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent#ut that,
Wayne Gerdes, the father of#oehypermiling,#can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Volvo s goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020 and its newest cars already start driving themselves
if they sense imminent danger, either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash.
and automakers could eliminate roll cages, returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage.
The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025;
NHTSA defines five levels of autonomous-car tech, with level zero being nothing. Level one cars include standard safety features such as ABS brakes, electronic stability control,
and adaptive cruise control (ACC). In level two, level-one features like lane centering and ACC tie together
and the car begins to drive itself. Level three has the Google-style autopilot. And level four is the holy grail#he car that can drive you home
when you re drunk and then go fetch another six-pack. Already NHTSA has mandated level-one technologies in every new car.
Several automakers have systems that approach level two on the test track, and Mercedes appears to be the first to market.
Mercedes offers Distronic Plus with Steering Assist as an option on the 2014 S-class luxury sedans.
GM anticipates its Super Cruise system will debut later this decade. Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of it. But the real engineering challenge is making sure the driver stays alert.#
#oeall kinds of problems crop up in real-world testing, #says auto-drive consultant Brad Templeton, who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.#
#oepeople start doing all kinds of things they shouldn t#igging around in the backseat, for example.
It freaks everybody out.##Level-two systems need constant human vigilance and oversight to guard against situations like a deer running into the road;
the car must be able to hand back control with no warning. But the temptation for drivers is to simply zone out.
So engineers have begun to design countermeasures. Mercedes, for example, requires two hands on the steering wheel at all times.#
#oeeveryone s looking for ways to keep the driver engaged, #says Dan Flores, a spokesman for GM.#
#oeas the car gets more and more capable, we want the driver to maintain driving expertise.##Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.#
#oeobviously, 99 percent just isn t good enough; we need 99.99999, #says Templeton.##oeand what people don t seem to realize is that the difference between those two numbers is huge.
It s not a one percent difference#t s an orders of magnitude difference.##Google is betting that established car manufacturers,
working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap. It s chosen a different technical path,
one that uses lidar to leapfrog level two altogether. It believes its level-three system will make cars safe enough for people to daydream
while they re being driven to work. And it s not stopping there. NHTSA s former deputy director, Ron Medford, has signed just on as Google s director of safety for the self-driving-car project.#
#oegoogle s main focus and vision,#says Medford,#oeis for a level-four vehicle.##Via Pop Sci Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati
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