Are fully autonomous vehicles a crock of sh*t?
AI-controlled cars were supposed to be a panacea for our transport woes. But are self-driving vehicles really the answer?Comment
Autonomous cars are the future, they say.
Safer, smarter time-savers, they say.
A paradigm shift for civilisation, they say.
Well, guess what? Artificial intelligence-controlled autonomous cars, robotaxis, self-driving vehicles or whatever else you want to call them have a long, long way to go before they transform our lives – if ever.
I’m not an autonomous vehicle (AV) hater. The idea of a quasi-time machine that allows you to you roll out of bed into your driverless robotaxi and then wake up at your destination three hours later fully rested is a lovely notion.
But spare a thought for the residents of San Francisco (arguably the global epicentre for AV testing due to Californian laws and its proximity to Silicon Valley), who are regularly faced with lengthy holdups due to malfunctioning AVs as part of wide-ranging robotaxi trials.
Or worse.
There have 623 autonomous vehicle crashes in the broader San Francisco Bay Area since 2014, according to AVCrashes.net, and the USA’s NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) reports that 18 associated fatalities had been recorded nationwide as of January 15, 2023.
OK, so we’re not seeing a code red situation (Skynet, anyone?) and robotaxis have been exceedingly handy for many, but residents of San Fran regularly complain about traffic snarls caused by AVs grinding to a halt because they’re unable to deal with the infinite number of scenarios we see on the road every day.
Reports of AVs obstructing public transport are commonplace and the San Francisco fire chief has reported almost 40 incidents in which AVs have ‘interfered’ with emergency responders.
Waymo and Cruise, the two biggest robotaxi operators in the San Francisco Bay Area (owned by Google and General Motors respectively) continue to scale up their fleets of self-driving vehicles and some people are now engaging in street warfare with AVs.
Vigilante groups have started warring with the AI-controlled vehicles by placing traffic cones on their bonnets, thereby befuddling and nullifying the ludicrously complex and expensive cars.
According to The Guardian, various activist groups including the Safe Street Rebels have been mobilising residents to take action against the automatons of San Fran.
Taxi and Uber drivers are also not very fond of robotaxis (to put it mildly!) as the income they would ordinarily earn instead fills the pockets of obscenely rich and powerful tech and automotive companies.
AV advocates talk up the technology as a silver bullet for road trauma, given 90 per cent of road deaths are caused by human error, and point to the extra relaxation time they will afford all of us, but leading Australian university, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has urged caution.
Already-common Level 1 and 2 automated driving systems like autonomous emergency braking, active cruise control and, at least for short periods, lane-keeping certainly make life easier behind the wheel if they’re well-sorted.
But full hands and feet-off Level 3 and 4 autonomous vehicles – which will need to be perfected before eyes-off Level 5 driverless cars like the ones being trialled in San Fran become legal on a widespread basis – are not necessarily safer than conventional cars.
Dr Neng Zhang from RMIT’s School of Engineering and lead author of the study “Is driving experience all that matters? Drivers’ takeover performance in conditionally automated driving” examined how experience and various distractions such as work, social media and rest impact a driver’s ability to respond in an emergency.
“We had them writing business emails, watching videos and taking a break with their eyes closed resting condition,” said Zhang of the Level 3 AV simulation.
“We found that resting resulted in the worst takeover response, followed by working. Social media was less disruptive. However, the longer the participant engaged in an activity, the worse their response was to an emergency.”
Zheng’s colleague and co-author Professor Mohammad Fard essentially flagged the need for federal and state governments to ensure self-driving cars do not become a societal scourge.
“Governments can effectively safeguard road safety by acknowledging these detrimental effects and regulating non-driving activities in the context of autonomous driving,” said the professor.
Even AI is facing an image crisis in Australia. And no, ChatGPT did not write this article and will never write anything bearing my name beyond meaningless platitudes to colleagues moving overseas to ‘find themselves’.
Indeed, the latest Roy Morgan survey of just over 1400 Australians aged 16 and above, which was co-funded by the Campaign for AI Safety, confirmed that 57 per cent of Aussies believe that AI ‘creates more problems than it solves’.
Should we be worried that autonomous vehicles could one day develop manipulator arms and enslave us all? It’s unlikely, but the Roy Morgan survey showed that one in five Australians think ‘AI presents a risk of human extinction in the next twenty years’.
Even if AVs manage to spread globally – once the legal issues around liability in the event of a collision are sorted – they’re unlikely to displace manually-operated vehicles altogether, but even BMW doesn’t think self-driving cars will go global.
Volkswagen reckons AVs will be mainstream by 2030 but whether that will include countries like Australia, or places with poor lane marking and road signage, remains to be seen. One former Holden technical engineer reckons there are plenty of hurdles here – particularly Australia’s unique road signs.
AVs becoming mainstream feels a bit like peak oil or the Y2K bug to me.
Rewind the clock two decades and a far less cynical Feann Torr was in Germany, talking to a senior engineer from one of the Big Three luxury marques who insisted that fully autonomous cars would be commonplace by 2020.
Of course they are not and may never be. In fact, I reckon autonomous flying cars may have a better chance of becoming more ‘commonplace’ sooner. Which is why, in my view, fully autonomous vehicles are a crock of sh*t.
Related: Autonomous cars may never go global, says BMW
Related: Volkswagen says self-driving cars to be mainstream by 2030
Related: Holden: Aussie road signs a big hurdle for autonomous cars
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