How Silicon Valley engineers are transforming cars into very smart, very fast and increasingly opinionated information systems
Posted 09.12.2011 at 10:11 am
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Flocking Behavior: General Motors's EN-V, built on a modified Segway chassis, would be able to cooperate autonomously with other EN-Vs and move in swarms. Courtesy GM
That near-literal leap of faith illustrates a trade-off that we will all soon face. For Liccardo’s stoplight experiment to be safe in the real world, every car would have to communicate not just with the lights but also with every surrounding car. Yet some engineers dream of a system in which decisions about stopping and starting are left to computers. Humans, with our propensity for random and potentially disastrous action, would be removed from the equation, and the motion of individual cars would be coordinated like packets negotiating a journey across the Internet. Which sounds a bit frightening. But if we were to trust the system that much, to let go of the wheel entirely, we might gain a great deal. Cars could travel in self-guided traffic swarms, moving within inches of each other, cruising through stop lights with milliseconds to spare. Traffic would decrease, and fuel efficiency would increase—theoretically, at least.
It won’t happen immediately. But traffic engineers at the U.S. Department of Transportation are already studying the potential benefits of various vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems. Could cars that can “see” one another reduce the approximately 5.8 million crashes and 37,000 deaths that occur on American roads every year? Could they ease the congestion that sucks 4.2 billion hours out of American lives every year? Could they make better use of the 2.8 billion gallons of fuel that are wasted in traffic every year? Engineers working for a DOT program called Intelligent Transportation Systems (which has existed since 1991 but which, under a new mandate set forth in 2009, is specifically focused on vehicle “connectivity”) are drawing on information from the auto labs in Silicon Valley to figure out whether autonomy would solve more problems than it would create.
The answers are unclear. In the meantime, the secretary of the agency, Ray LaHood, has raised concerns about what may be a transition period, when drivers are confronted by more and more data stimuli yet don’t have the safety benefit of greater automotive autonomy. Last year, LaHood called the increase in auto fatalities as a result of distracted driving “a deadly epidemic,” a problem not unlike drunk driving. A University of Utah study suggests that the loss of acuity caused by using hands-free phones is equivalent to that of having a 0.08 blood-alcohol percentage. In 2009, nearly 5,500 people died in crashes involving distracted driving. So far, legislatures in 34 states and the District of Columbia have enacted full or partial bans on phone use in cars. “I’m on a rampage about this,” LaHood told the New York Times, “and I’m not going to let up.”
Distraction will be exactly what we seek as we while away our commute in self-piloted cars.Eventually, though, if the Silicon Valley engineers have their way, the cars will pass through the valley of distraction and into the realm of total autonomy—and then distraction will be exactly what we seek as we while away the commute in our idiotproof pleasure domes. In Europe, one Mercedes-Benz model is already available with an in-dash browser that connects to the Internet via cellular networks. When the car is stationary, you can use Facebook. When you’re moving, you can search for a nearby hotel using Google Maps. Johann Jungwirth, who directs Mercedes’s own Silicon Valley outpost, says the Web has just begun invading the cockpit. Soon, social-networking applications will allow drivers to communicate with one another as if chatting online. Then comes augmented reality: information about the landscape ahead being projected into the driver’s field of vision, like an annotated windshield. The road itself could become another layer of entertainment.
Control is the key. Who has the wheel? And cars themselves, as Byron Shaw, the managing director of General Motors’s Advanced Technology Office told me will increasingly have an opinion on the matter.
The GM office, tucked between an Equinox gym and a Fry’s Electronics, is among the newest and smallest of the automaker outposts. Standing in a room with high ceilings, exposed wood beams and abundant skylights, Shaw explained how a car could become aware of a driver’s wishes, and of that driver’s fitness to express them.
Somewhere in the office, he said, was a headset made by a local company called NeuroSky, which measures brain waves using EKG sensors and may one day allow for control using only thoughts. “You can put that on and be Luke Skywalker,” Shaw said. “You can bring the X-wing fighter up out of the swamp.” Seriously? “Not quite yet. But kids today are going to grow up with that as their game interface.” Earlier this year, researchers at Free University Berlin demonstrated a thought-controlled Volkswagen Passat, which they modified to run on brain-activity-mapping devices built by the Bay Area company Emotiv.
That control can run two ways, though. “Say you had a bad argument with your boss and you’re not thinking about driving,” Shaw said. “That can be measured, in a sense,” and the car can be programmed to respond. I had heard similar ideas at both Mercedes and BMW—that cars will one day monitor our vital signs using biometric sensors in the seats, and if they detected, for example, an oncoming seizure, they would navigate out of traffic and call 911.
Smartphones Linked to Cars: Engineers at BMW are deploying cellular networks to link cars to smartphones and data sources in the cloud. Courtesy BMW
We walked into a small garage, and as Shaw pointed to a pair of large wooden air-freight crates stacked in a corner, our conversation shifted to fully autonomous cars. “Those are the EN-Vs,” he said. (We took a test-drive in the EN-V earlier this year--click here to check out our impressions.) Inside the crates were some two-person eggshells mounted on self-balancing, two-wheeled Segway-style platforms. In 2008, GM’s then-R&D director, Larry Burns, predicted that autonomous vehicles would be ready for the mainstream by 2018; the EN-V is one attempt to make his prediction come true. The pods are designed to shuttle people in dense, connected swarms.
The EN-V may seem odd, but it makes sense in the context of a growing market for mobility. “A confluence of forces is changing things right now,” Shaw said. “Electrification, concerns about our carbon footprint and domestic security, the rapid pace of technology development, globalization. All of them are happening at the same time.” In developing economies, Shaw said, “you have masses of people who never had any experience with owning a car and don’t necessarily have a preconceived notion of what owning a car is supposed to be like.” Maybe, he continued, car ownership shifts toward a cellphone model, in which drivers would get a free or highly subsidized car and sign up for a fee plan that includes fuel or access to charging stations.
Standing in the garage, staring at crates containing prototype autonomous pod-cars and thinking about cell plans and interfaces, it became clear that Silicon Valley was doing a lot more than making cars smarter. It was doing for the auto industry what it had done for the computer industry a generation ago: transforming unfathomably complex machines into consumer objects that require almost no skill to operate. An old IBM mainframe would arrive with a shelf of thick manuals. An iPhone requires almost no instruction. Users can think less about what is under the hood and more about whatever it is they want to do, whether it’s sending a text or driving to the corner store. All they have to do is let go of the wheel.
Whether it’s wise to put this much trust into our cars is another question, one that might be best answered a few exits up Highway 101 at Google’s massive campus in Mountain View. In 2007, Google hired Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University artificial-intelligence researcher, to work on the company’s Street View program and then to lead its own autonomous car division. Google’s seven robotic cars (six Priuses and an Audi TT) have since logged more than 100,000 fully autonomous miles on California roads. In June, Google convinced the Nevada legislature to require the state DMV to write rules that permit the operation of autonomous cars. Thrun says robots are better drivers and that robot cars could cut the number of fatal traffic accidents (about 1.2 million per year worldwide) in half. That is the argument for giving up control. And it is true that in all the miles his cars have driven so far, there has been only a single accident—when a human-driven car rear-ended a robo-Prius at a light.
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About the cover pix. Very cool looking car but I see a major design flaw; unsprung weight! Those massive hub assemblies will result in severe handling problems and a very rough ride.
ProfChuck: Could the car frame function as a torsion spring?
I guess the first picture in the article is an artistic drawing of a car in 2030. The drawing is more for fun at the moment.
Another design flaw is there is no axle turning the wheels!!! How does that car move? Cool concept drawing though.
Edit,
Maybe it has really small electric engines on the front wheels........... However, front wheel drive FTL.
Thinking of cars of the future and more options: Typically, if I hit the car in front of me, I am considered at fault. I wish they make a camera in front of a car with a dvr. So, when a driver cuts me off and they stop short I have a factual case on my side. Maybe the car should also have a rear camera as well attaché to the dvr?
@Jvg: Profchuck is correct. The ratio of sprung (i.e. held up by the springs)vs. unsprung mass is what's important. The sprung mass provides intertia, while the wheels (unsprung) move up and down with the bumps in the road. The heavier (more massive) the wheels, the more force is required to dampen them. If the wheels were too heavy, the vehicle would behave like a buckboard, on rough roads.
@Army Juggernaut: If you look at the drawing carefully, you'll see fairly large electric motors built into each hub assembly. You can also see the novel ways each wheel is attached to the rest of the car. The attachments for the front wheels are necessairly more complex than the rear, to allow for steering.
tundrasea, and in the center of this car is lots of buttons. The future name of this car is "The POWERFUL MACH 5". As you push buttons you will here, sprong-ying! Followed by lots of wooooo, ooo wooo-aaa's!
This is a futuristic car, so in the future they have really develop powerful springs in the wheels. You park your car in the garage at night and an electric machine rolls the wheels backwards all night long. In the morning, you just hit go! This is why in the picture we do not see a motor or anything. The springs in the wheels power you forward. No, I have no idea how you reverse.
Do you think I make a car? lol. ;)
Traffic light communicating with smart cars are great, until some pedestrian decided to rush across the zebra line at the last second. It happens.
Picture this scenario: 3 lane local street, your car on the right lane. Red light ahead, the right lane is empty, two lanes on the left have SUV or trucks stopped. Your car tell you the light will turn green just as you hit the zebra line if you speed up. Just as you near the zebra line, a pedestrian who is too slow to complete the crossing stepped into the space in front of you. No brake in the world is going to stop your car in time, and you are blocked by the cars and street sign posts.
You can't be all knowing, and the smart communications may give you false sense of safty margin. I once almost hit a child who suddenly step out between a bus and a truck, while I was turning right. If not because I always turn slowly and cautiously, he would surely be struck. All this smart devices could lure you into speeding to beat the traffic lights.
The body of the car had suspension built into the design. The curved metal was designed to flex like a ridged spring that would replace previous designs for shocks and springs.
@Army Juggernaut
I am pretty sure the structure holding the wheel has some sort of electromagnet, which would oscillate and attract either the top or bottom of the wheel, while the wheel would have a north magnet and a south magnet on opposite sides.
However, I do think it would not work, because there is no suspension.
Will Popular Science investigate this doomsday threat before 2012? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCRY8ovQ3k8
I think cars will get smaller. Much, much smaller than Smart cars..kinda like Segways...but lighter...30-50kg, perhaps ?....and then we will be able to stack them into little flying craft with high power electric motors that work off very high density batteries based on carbon nanotube structures. Once we hook them together, the car and the aircraft(including lighter than air blimps)...bye bye airports !
Of course, dust effects, especially during liftoff and touchdown operations will still be a serious problem. Now, that will need some serious architectural problem solving. My proposal is that we include a tower (much like a helipad) in each home, and several large scale structures like these in commercial areas, so we don't have to redesign the city from scratch.
Engineers and whiz kids tend to be overly optimistic about the prospects of the auto-driven car. Like some have commented before, who's responsible when an accident happens. The car company, the company who supplied the hardware, the one who supplied the software, a provider or... you. In the end it is the driver who is, and should be responsible, and will be for a very long time. Can't take away too many tasks then. He (or she) may doze off.
Voyager, quite simply in an accident involving a driverless car and a driver controlled car, the driver is at fault if the hardware can be proven to be working correctly at the time. In multiple driverless car accidents, likely hardware failure would be to blame, but not necessarily the manufacturer. Things deteriorate over time. If your car had a failure due to lack of maintenance, then it's all your own fault.
Fascinating article, though pretty thick with speculation. I have to say, though, some of these ideas seem simply BAD. For instance:
"But if we were to trust the system that much, to let go of the wheel entirely, we might gain a great deal. Cars could travel in self-guided traffic swarms, moving within inches of each other, cruising through stop lights with milliseconds to spare. Traffic would decrease, and fuel efficiency would increase—theoretically, at least."
Ok, I'll grant that's "cool." But at this point you have to start asking: Why are we driving cars at all? The automobile used to be a symbol (and a means) of personal independence. How much independence exists in this futuristic vision? Time was, folks drove cars because they thought driving was fun. The cars being described in the article assume as a first principle that driving is boring, and must therefore be replaced by other (specifically computer-based) forms of entertainment:
"...distraction will be exactly what we seek as we while away the commute in our idiotproof pleasure domes. .... Soon, social-networking applications will allow drivers to communicate with one another as if chatting online."
Um, but why not just roll down the window?
Again I have to ask: why are we driving cars? Wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper, and more environmentally sound to simply increase the rail network of the country and go back to taking the train? (Cf. any major city in Europe.) If you actually have a commute so long you want to be bumming around on FaceBook, why not cut out the driving altogether? In fact, why not walk around, have a three-course meal, and talk with fellow travelers while you're at it? One bullet train and the guy or two driving it may or may not be smarter than a thousand computerized cars, but I dare say they're a lot cheaper.
I guess I'm saying, are we REALLY simplifying and improving our lives by outfitting every one of several billion cars with a Mars Rover's worth of sensors, cameras, gyros, antennae, and microchips? And furthermore, if we're working our tails off to create (or, as consumers, to afford) "idiotproof pleasure domes," don't we have to stop and ask "What exactly does that make us?"
I think some of these engineers and dreamers need to go back and watch Wall-E and consider what societal goals we're really trying to attain.
The whole robot car thing is really cool, but what hapens when the robot malfunctions? Would the driver be able to stop the car, or would he crash and die?
A so many minds stuck in the past. The sprung and unsprung weight of wheel/tire assemblies means nothing in the future! By 2030 we will have confirmed the Higgs Boson particle and will manipulate matter at will to adjust mass. This car will be able to travel at or exceed the speed of light because at a subatomic level the particles it is made up of will have no mass. What you see as wheels the true futurist sees as compact particle accelerators
This vehicle can both travel the speed of light and through time as a result. This is actually a rendering of a future Dolorean. Of course minus the nuclear generator that runs off of biological waste matter. Instead particles with no mass require no energy to accelerate, or at least very little (Im no physicist). Pollution and depleting energy concerns are out the window when we can accelerate objects by removing the fundamental component that makes up their mass.
Oh and roads will be paved in carbon nanotubes.
and it makes a mean cup of coffee....