Driverless car debate intensifies

As autonomous cars draw nearer the yay- and naysayers are increasingly vociferous

Google has long been eyed with suspicion by privacy advocates, despite its “don’t be evil” mantra.

So have personal and in-car GPS packages. What’s not to get worried about then, when a company already making astrobucks gathering, collating and commercialising personal data off what was once so often called the “information superhighway” starts moving in on conventional highways?

First came the puff of enthusiasm for the concept of the mass-market autonomous car, as ears pricked up to its feasibility with GPS, in-car computing, electric steering, mobile communications bandwidth and other technologies growing in sophistication and plunging downmarket.

More recently has come the realisation that the driverless car is accelerating towards us faster than we might have thought feasible just five years ago.

Over the last year, that early preoccupation with the technology’s pros has met with a growing list of cons.

The idea of the driverless car has been gathering momentum for some time. It was four years ago that Richard Marshall, then newly appointed as Holden’s director of energy and environment, spelt out to motoring.com.au in detail the many advantages of relieving humans of control of their cars.

Under the guidance of well-developed traffic management systems and in-car communications technologies, primary safety (crash avoidance) would improve enough for manufacturers to make dramatic cuts to secondary safety (crash protection) systems. Marshall said conventional wisdom had it that the average family car could shed as much as two thirds of its mass, from about 1500kg to 500 or 600kg. The effect on fuel efficiency and emissions hardly needs to be spelt out.

Then there’s all the other stuff: no speeding tickets or DUIs, easy and/or productive commuting time, the real-time optimisation of peak-hour traffic and the prospect of unsupervised transport for youngsters and the elderly.

Then there are the by-products of the always-on communications channel inherent to such cars. It readies its host vehicle for car-to-car and car-to-X networks, allowing cars to advise each other automatically of hazards and changing road conditions ahead in real time. Again, the implications for traffic management and the resultant benefits to the environment are immense.

The last year, however, has seen privacy and consumer advocate groups becoming increasingly vocal about the downsides of vehicle autonomy. A year ago, consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog raised concerns about Google’s true motives in the leading role it’s playing in developing and rolling out the technology for driverless motoring.

While Google’s lobbying focuses legislative attention on safety and emissions issues, Consumer Watchdog claims it’s much more about opening up a new channel for the mining and commercial exploitation of data.

The intensity of the company’s lobbying efforts suggests motives beyond the altruistic: as Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project launched its campaign last year, US News & World Report noted the Californian IT giant spent $US5 million on lobbying fees in the first quarter of 2012 alone. That, added tech-culture magazine Wired, was more than the total lobbying spend by Apple, Facebook and Microsoft combined in the same period.

The doubters have found support in the wider community, according to a recent survey reported by Wall Street Journal blogger Joseph B White. In the poll, published in June by the US Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, 42 per cent of respondents didn’t like the idea of self-driving cars, while 33 per cent liked it.

As a useful pointer to how alien the idea remains to the average consumer, the survey revealed that 24 per cent didn’t know what to make of the technology and 16 per cent weren’t sure of why it might be important. About 40 per cent were dubious that vehicle autonomy would improve safety, with no less than 81 per cent expressing concern about the possibility of vehicles falling under the control of system hackers.

But the major issue for most was privacy, with 75 per cent concerned that operating companies like Google would use the self-drive technology to collect personal data, and 70 per cent worrying that data would be shared with the government.

Despite these suspicions, however, consumers and pundits remain receptive to the idea. A number of the latter have pointed out that those so concerned with avoiding the gaze of authorities and marketers should switch off their mobile phones ASAP, and leave them switched off.

As Washington Post blogger Timothy B Lee puts it, “opposing self-driving technology because of the privacy concerns makes about as much sense as opposing cellphones for privacy reasons.”

In a posting headlined “Self-driving cars are a privacy nightmare. And it’s totally worth it”, Lee concludes the individual benefits and social utility of the technology outweigh the incursion on our already compromised privacy, so as to render the downside negligible.

For consumers, that’s especially so when things are couched in the language of the wallet. In a global survey published in May by IT giant Cisco, 74 per cent of respondents would allow their driving habits to be monitored if it allowed them to save on insurance and service maintenance costs.

Overall, more than half that survey’s 1500 respondents (57 per cent) said they would be likely to go driverless in such vehicles, while 46 per cent said they’d let their children do the same thing.

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Driverless car debate intensifies

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