IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 63

Volvo supplied cars that automatically followed in a line behind a truck driven by a
professional driver, saving effort and fuel.
A lead engineer in that project, Erik
Coelingh, says Volvo is using a fleet of 100
cars to test out autonomy in the Swedish
city of Gothenburg. Such validation will
take time, he adds, no matter how fast
other technologies may advance. "Even
if you've tested the system in 10 cars and
it works fine, with not a single incident, it
doesn't tell you a lot about how 100 000
cars will do on the road."
He sees the technology advancing by
degrees, beginning in test-bed cities like
Gothenburg and in places where pedestrians aren't allowed-say, within mines
in Australia, where huge robotrucks are
already carrying ore. Next come traffic jams, where movement is slow and
there is no oncoming traffic. Then, he
says, come selected routes, every meter
of which has been carefully validated, so
that a driver can just "punch a button to
drive autonomously."
Testing will proceed road by road and
city by city, Coelingh says, building to the
point at which cars can plan the route and
take you there, from door to door. But he
figures it'll be 10 years for the first commercial robocars (that's three more years
than Ghosn predicts), and 20 before they
take up a big share of new sales. However,
he allows, autonomy could come faster in
places where much of the infrastructure
is only now being put in, like China. (By
the way, Volvo is now owned by Geely
Automobile, a Chinese firm.)
Where infrastructure is designed with
robocars in mind, many of the hardest
problems will be easy to solve. Cars will
talk to the road, to the traffic signs, and to
one another. What one car up ahead can
see, all will know about. Even the problem of identifying pedestrians lurking
behind shrubbery will finally fade away:
After all, if cars can talk to signs, they can
certainly talk to the cellphone in your
pocket. Traffic | continued on Page 90
illustRation by

MCKIBILLO

iDrive
What could PoSSibly go Wrong?

When
99% Safe
Isn't Safe
Enough

the dangers of autonomous-drive
technology arise just as
it approaches perfection
the worst thing that
will accompany the march
of robocar technology will
come when cars are almost
but not quite autonomous.
Their prowess will lull alltoo-human drivers into
complacency.
"Automating the vehicle is
a long continuum," says Josh
Switkes, founder and chairman
of Peloton Technology, which
is working on automating
trucks. "If the driver doesn't
do anything most of the time
but still has to do emergency
braking? That's not good. He
doesn't pay attention-he's not
there when you need him."

To stop that from happening,
this year's Mercedes S-Class
car actually sounds an alarm
if the driver's hand leaves the
wheel for more than 10 seconds. Expect such backseat
driving to get worse as selfdriving technology gets better.
A second problem will be
the eye-catching nature of the
few accidents that do happen
when cars routinely speed
along with a 2-meter gap
between them. In that world,
anything that goes wrong for
one car will go wrong for a lot
of cars, and nobody will heed
those who cite the statistics
showing that driving is safer
SPectrum.ieee.orG

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than walking. We know
this will happen because it
already has-for air travel.
There will be other little
problems. The early robocars
will be tuned to "extra polite,"
allowing aggressive human
drivers to practically run them
off the road. Lawyers will have
a field day when something
goes wrong. And the very
connectedness of cars-
to one another and to the
roads and signage-will take
away the anonymity of the
passengers. You'll never drive
alone-even if you want to.
Even the cities, relieved of
most of their burden of cars,
will also miss the revenue
from parking fees. And publictransit systems, like subways,
will suffer for lack of business.
But really, the worst single
thing that could happen is that
the autonomous car might not
happen fast enough-not until
the very end of the forecasting
horizon of this special issue of
IEEE Spectrum.
"Really automatic, as for
a blind driver? Fifty years,"
says Jens Desens, a Daimler
engineer who works on his
company's experimental
autonomous car and ought
to know. He waves both
hands for emphasis, which
he can do because the car
is doing all the driving.
We're outside Stuttgart,
cruising along an autobahn in
a Mercedes S-Class tricked
out with extra sensors. Unlike
the experimental version, it
can't handle city streets, but
it sure knows how to pass a
slowpoke on a highway.
"Come on," I sputter, after
just such a demonstration.
"If this car can do this now,
what won't it be able to do in
a decade?"
Desens sits back, his hands
in his lap (of course), and sighs.
"Look, we started in the
'60s and '70s last century to
develop this radar," he says
with another sigh. "It was
this big"-his hands spread
way out again-"like three
suitcases. We started to sell
it only in 1999. So 25 years
of development just for the
radar sensor." -P.E.R.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014
