Automotive Engineering - September 2023 - 4

EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Bill Visnic
Editorial Director
Bill.Visnic@sae.org
Of moose and artificial intelligence
I know nothing more about artificial intelligence
(AI) than what I read and what
learned people tell me. I know it's supposed
to bring new sophistication to all
manner of processes and technologies,
including automated driving. So, when a
driverless robotaxi operated by GM's
Cruise plowed into a road section of
freshly poured cement in San Francisco,
it raised questions about recently beleaguered
Cruise. My mind wandered to AI,
which many AV compute " stacks " are
touted to leverage in abundance. Driving
into wet cement isn't intelligent.
Did somebody need to train the vehicle's
AV stack specifically to recognize
wet cement? If that's how it works, I'd
prefer not to bet my life on whether
some fairly oddball happenstance (is
the term 'edge case' not cool anymore?)
had been accounted for in that
particular version of the AD system's
algorithm running that particular day.
The premise of whether AVs can be
made sufficiently intelligent and able to
account for any situation caused me to
recall a wet-cement analogue from a
quarter century ago. In 1997, MercedesBenz
had just launched the A-Class, the
company's first run at the compact-car
segment. It was an almost unthinkable
stretch for the brand and a key challenge
was convincing consumers that
the tiny A-Class had the same level of
safety as any larger Mercedes-Benz. But
in an obscure-to-non-Scandinavians
crash-avoidance maneuver called the
" moose test " conducted by a Swedish
auto magazine, the A-Class flipped. The
failure made global headlines.
Mercedes-Benz acted swiftly to correct
the A-Class' stability, chiefly with
the addition of the then gee-whiz technology
of electronic stability control, or
ESP. The controversy and ding to the
brand's image subsided. But I remembered
an interview two decades later
that Juergen Hubbert, the executive
who ran Daimler's Mercedes-Benz business
during the moose-test crisis, gave
to Europe's Automobilwoche and which
4 September 2023
appeared in Automotive News Europe.
The reporter asked Hubbert if the
engineers developing this crucial model
were familiar with the moose test. " We
really did every test you can imagine, "
he responded. Except they didn't. They
hadn't figured on a moose.
Back to the current day, it's easy to
pick on the misadventures of driverless
taxis, but irrespective of the general
safety implications of these failures, I'm
struggling to understand why AI isn't
improving simpler aspects of ACES (automated,
connected, electrified, shared)
vehicle development. One example: I've
long bored friends and colleagues with
my ongoing war against what I regard
as the non-'naturalistic' and juvenile
fashion in which almost all adaptive
cruise-control systems execute certain
common high-speed maneuvers. Yep, I
include current 'hands-off' systems, too.
How about voice recognition in today's
supposedly high-function userexperience
(UX) environments? This
technology, which has been commonplace
for over a decade, is about the
same hit-or-miss proposition it was in
its early days. One writer's recent review
of a 2023 model said giving voice
commands via the vehicle's infotainment
UX was essentially " useless. "
Cloud-based voice-response collaborations
such as Amazon's Alexa don't
seem to be substantively improving
anything, either. Shouldn't fixing voicerecognition's
comparatively modest
problems be child's play for AI?
Artificial intelligence seems destined
to be useful for optimizing productivity
in chaotic systems with lots of variables
and patterns to be ordered and
analyzed. It's said to already be transformative
in some manufacturing and
research-and-development environments.
I don't doubt AI is going to
have its triumphs. But wet cement and
the Moose test make me think there
always will be situations that go beyond
what programmers can conceive.
Bill Visnic, Editorial Director
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AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
Automotive Engineering - September 2023

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