IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 62

intervene; in 20, they won't need your
advice; and in 30, they won't take it.
Accident rates will plummet, parking
problems will vanish, streets will narrow,
cities will bulk up, and commuting by automobile will become a mere extension of
sleep, work, and recreation. With no steering column and no need for a crush zone in
front of the passenger compartment (after
all, there aren't going to be any crashes),
car design will run wild: Collapsibility!
Stackability! Even interchangeability, because when a car can come when called,
pick up a second or third passenger for a
fee, and park itself, even the need to own
the thing will dwindle.
"When we modeled that for Ann Arbor,
Mich., we found we'd need only 15 percent of the cars now owned there," for a
per-mile cost savings of 75 percent, says
Larry Burns, director of the Program on
Sustainable Mobility at the Earth Institute
of Columbia University, in New York City.
Burns is no ivory-tower academic: In his
previous job he headed up research and
development for General Motors.
What's most striking about the new
thinking is how suddenly it jelled. Two
MIT economists, Erik Brynjolfsson and
Andrew McAfee, write about the switch

in their recent book, The Second Machine
Age, in which they describe their 2012 spin
in the Google self-driving car as almost
"boring" because the car drove "exactly
the way we're all taught to in driver's ed."
They then note that the experience "was
especially weird for us because only a few
years earlier we were sure that computers
would not be able to drive cars."
Many others were just as sure. Read what
Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane
of Harvard wrote about the challenge of
city driving back in 2004, in their book
The New Division of Labor:
As the driver makes his left turn against
traffic, he confronts a wall of images and
sounds generated by oncoming cars,
traffic lights, storefronts, billboards,
trees, and a traffic policeman. Using his
knowledge, he must estimate the size
and position of each of these objects
and the likelihood that they pose a
hazard.... Articulating this knowledge
and embedding it in software for all but
highly structured situations are at present enormously difficult tasks.

A y e A r A f ter those l in es w er e
written, Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford team's car to victory in the DARPA
Grand Challenge, the Defense Advanced

Learning to Think
sixty-five years of automotive
baby steps

Research Projects Agency's autonomous
vehicle race. Two years later, Google hired
Thrun. And in 2010 Thrun's group unveiled Google's car.
Why the sudden change? Maybe it had
to do with the ongoing drop in the cost
of radar, infrared imagers, sonar, GPS,
and other sensors. Or maybe it was the
dramatic improvement in the processing
power of embedded systems. Or it could
be that engineers had just gotten comfortable with such building-block technologies as adaptive cruise control, automatic
parking, and navigation.
In any case, by the beginning of this decade every major automaker was working on autonomous driving. The most
in-your-face firm, as usual, is Nissan
Motor Co., whose chief executive, Carlos
Ghosn, recently promised to introduce not
one car but a line of cars that can drive
themselves-by 2020. Big talk, you may
say, but in 2007 Ghosn vowed to deliver
the all-electric Leaf by 2010, and he did.
Interesting, also, is Volvo's growing investment in autonomous driving technology. As part of the European research
project known as SARTRE (Social Attitudes
to Road Traffic Risk in Europe), the final
version of which ran from 2009 to 2012,

2014 NHTSA issues draft of
proposed rule making for
autonomous driving

2018-2019 Expected launch of first
vehicles with vehicle-to-vehicle and
vehicle-to-infrastructure communication

2012 Nevada offers licenses
for autonomous cars

1948 Modern cruise
control invented

2010 Google Car debuts. It
takes a blind man for tacos

1966 Mechanical antilock braking
installed in a standard production
car, the British Jensen FF

2007 DARPA's third
driverless-car competition,
the DARPA Urban Challenge

1968 Electronic cruise
control invented

1995 Mitsubishi Diamante introduces
laser-based adaptive cruise control
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jun 2014

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north american

2013 Mercedes "Bertha"
AG takes itself on a road
trip. Mercedes S-Class gets
highway autonomy (but
requires attentive driver as
a backup)
2025 Fully autonomous cars
(with driver backup) tested

1987 Electronic stability
control invented by BMW,
Bosch, and Mercedes

62

2020 Limited selfdriving expected to
begin, starting with
traffic-jam assist

|

2001 Nissan Cima introduces
lane-departure warning system
SPectrum.ieee.orG

2003 Toyota Harrier comes with
precrash mitigation system

2030 Fully
autonomous cars
(with no driver
backup)

ZZ
Z

2032 Half of all new cars
are autonomous
illustRation by

James Provost
http://SPectrum.ieee.orG
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014
