Arguments for driverless cars

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Self-Driving Cars Are Not As Safe As Vehicles Operated by Human Drivers Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection. 2017. COPYRIGHT 2018 Gale, a Cengage Company Full Text:

Article Commentary

“An autonomous vehicle in heavy, but steady, freeway traffic would be a cybernetic grandma, stuck in the fast lane doing the speed limit and too scared to change lanes even as angry drivers behind it pressed closely to its bumper.”

Paul Wagenseil is a contributing writer to Tom’s Guide , an online guide to tech products. In the following viewpoint, the author discusses the safety hazards of self-driving car technology. He analyzes guidelines released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in September 2016 and states that while the guidelines sound like an endorsement of self-driving vehicles, they are a sign of future regulations to come. The author then evaluates the safety of self-driving cars, including the threat of hacking to self-driving cars’ systems. Wagenseil inspects Tesla’s autopilot technology and a fatal traffic accident it caused in Ohio. He argues that this accident could have been avoided if a human, instead of a robot, had been driving. The author then discusses a study by the University of Michigan that found that self-driving cars are twice as likely to cause accidents than human drivers.

As you read, consider the following questions:

According to Wagenseil, how did the autopilot technology in the driverless car in Ohio cause a fatal traffic accident?1. Do you agree with the author’s argument that self-driving cars can’t make the same in-the-moment reactions that humans can? Why or why2. not? How might a car company releasing a new self-driving vehicle publicize that the driverless car is safer than a traditional car?3.

Self-driving cars—two-ton robots moving at high speed—are not ready for the road, and won’t be for many years. Technology companies such as Google and, especially, Tesla are moving far too fast toward granting robot cars total autonomy, because they’re not used to software and sensor problems leading to fatal accidents.

The U.S. government yesterday (September 19, 2016) made a half-step toward regulating self-driving cars. Most media coverage spun that as an endorsement of the technology, but there’s an alternative view: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has accepted autonomous vehicles as inevitable, and is jumping in before more people get killed.

Legacy automakers may not be as quick as Tesla to issue security patches for their computerized cars, but at least they deeply understand the risks of taking control away from human drivers, and aren’t being so arrogant as to beta-test autonomous vehicles on public roadways. We should look to Detroit and Washington for leadership in this field, not Silicon Valley.

“Advanced automated vehicle safety technologies, including fully self-driving cars, may prove to be the greatest personal transportation revolution since the popularization of the personal automobile nearly a century ago,” the NHTSA said in the introduction to its Federal Automated Vehicles Policy paper yesterday (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/AV%20policy%20guidance%20PDF.pdf): “Automated driving innovations could dramatically decrease the number of crashes tied to human choices and behavior.”

The policy paper lays out voluntary guidelines, not mandatory regulations, and does sound more like an endorsement than a warning. But in the fine print, the message is clear that regulations will come—and what those future regulations will look like depends on how well the makers of self-driving cars follow today’s guidelines.

The paper asks that all companies involved in self-driving cars, from software coders to car builders to sensor makers to taxi-fleet operators, submit safety assessments covering 15 different criteria to the NHTSA four months before road testing begins. Those criteria range from vehicle cybersecurity to post-crash behavior to fallback mechanisms for when self-driving systems fail.

Compliance with these guidelines will be easier for Tesla, Google and General Motors than it will be for solo tinkerers like George Hotz, the famous iPhone and PlayStation hacker who is building a self-driving car in his garage. But it will force even the big companies to slow down their aggressive testing of robot cars on public roadways.