William Flew Articles about Self-Drive Cars

Most Trips

Most - at least 95% - car journeys are very boring - commutes, taking kids to school, going to the supermarket.

For those journeys, self-drive cars will be an enormous boon.

The commute can be used for napping, reading, watching TV, eating and drinking. Instead of arriving at destination frazzled and irritable, the trip has been purely me-time.

Kids can be sent to school without mum having to deliver them.

People with physical or sight disabilities can be mobile again.

Recreation

One group of drivers will be unhappy - those who get pleasure from driving themselves in a vehicle they enjoy being in.

But today's roads are no longer racetracks - they are too crowded and too heavily monitored, to get away with speeding.

And the old-fashioned cars will be discouraged from sharing the road with the modern, autonomous cars.

'Nudges' like very high insurance premiums, higher fees to use roads to reflect the much greater space they take up, restrictions on what roads can be driven, and when.

Long term it will be a repeat of the process with horses a century ago - they will eventually be banned from using the roads, and will be only be allowed on racetracks and private roads. And just as with pony clubs, groups of keen drivers will join forces to buy private driving tracks.

US - Teenagers No Longer Car Crazy

For generations of American teenagers, obtaining a driver’s license was a rite of passage. But when Jonathan Golden, a scruffy-haired high schooler who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., turned 16 in November, he couldn’t be bothered with the bureaucracy of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Instead, he wanted his own Uber account.

That way, he could do normal teenage things like meeting friends at the mall, going to the movies or coming home from school without having to call his parents. He was also open to the idea of picking up a date in an Uber, though he says he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment.

“It’s like you’re being driven around by your parents, but you don’t have to hold a conversation with them,” he said.

While Jonathan may be an early adopter, he said that most of his friends don’t have a license or car, either. Often they share Uber rides, using the app’s built-in fare-splitting feature, for after-school outings and weekend hangouts.

The lack of excitement about driving among teenagers is not unique to Jonathan and his friends, but points to a growing cultural shift.

In recent years, there has been a considerable decline in the percentage of teenagers with a driver’s license, according to Brandon Schoettle, a project manager at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, who has studied the decline with Michael Sivak. In one study, they found that the ranks of 16-year-olds in the United States with a driver’s license had fallen to 28 percent in 2010, from 46 percent in 1983.

Mr. Schoettle said that while the number of licensed teenagers has started to level off in some areas (though rising slightly in a select few), there are many reasons that teenagers are choosing not to get a license, including the advent of ride-sharing apps.

“Having the convenience of Lyft and Uber probably outweighs the money and cost of owning a vehicle,” Mr. Schoettle said in a phone interview. “The cellphone also makes it so much more convenient to get a ride from a friend or taxi service.”

There are also financial considerations. While AAA estimates that the cost of owning a car has fallen in recent years, maintenance, registration fees, insurance and gas quickly add up to thousands of dollars. (And if you’re like me, there are also parking tickets to pay.)

Enter the ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, which are often cheaper and more efficient than owning a car.

But there are drawbacks to this decline in car culture. Jonathan, for example, would miss out on the bonding experience of having his father teach him how to drive (though they did bond over the pitfalls of Uber “surge pricing,” his father, Eric Golden, told me).

And there are those nostalgic teenage moments like driving around with friends and singing to the radio, sitting on your trunk in an empty parking lot, or making out with someone in the back of the car.

But for Mr. Golden, 46, an entrepreneurial executive, those cultural losses are outweighed by the safety advantages. “I kept pushing my son, saying ‘Don’t you want to learn how to drive?’ and he’d say, ‘Maybe, but not right now,’ ” Mr. Golden said. “Then it occurred to me: Why am I pushing him so hard? An Uber is going to be so much safer than a 16-year-old behind the wheel.”

He’s right. According to federal statistics that were published in April 2014, 1,875 drivers age 15 to 20 died in car crashes in 2012. An additional 184,000 young drivers were injured that year. (The good news: Young driver fatalities and accidents are on the decline from previous years.)

A report released last month by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit research group, found that 6 out of 10 car accidents involving teenagers were a result of being distracted while driving.

Numbers like that frighten me when I think about my own soon-to-be-born son growing up and getting behind the wheel, especially after what I witnessed during my own high school years. In the early 1990s, five of my classmates were killed in a car race near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with one car plunging into a canal. (And that was not the last fatal car accident that occurred in high school, either.)

Moreover, there were occasions when I almost totaled my own car, being too immature and stupid to recognize the potential consequences of driving too fast.

But does the gain in traffic safety come at the loss of independence? Yes and no, said Amanda Lenhart, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, who focuses on teenagers. While teenagers may be less free to move around and explore, she said, the independence that a driver’s license once symbolized has been replaced by the cellphone.

“Young people wouldn’t delay getting their license if they felt that it was critical to them as a talisman for freedom and independence,” Ms. Lenhart said.

All of this may be moot a decade from now, as technology not only upends car culture, but driving itself.

Mr. Golden, who also has a 13-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, said that by the time his youngest turns 16, a driver’s license could be obsolete. “My hope is that before the 7-year-old needs to learn how to drive, cars will be self-driving,” Mr. Golden said.

And if they’re not, his youngest can always split the cost of an Uber with his older brother.

Britain - Young Don't Want To Own

A study found that young people were ditching car ownership because of internet shopping, taxi-sharing apps and better public transport.

The fall was also attributed to the escalating cost of insurance for young people, with some being quoted almost £5,400 a year for comprehensive cover.

Older drivers, meanwhile, are hanging on to their cars to “preserve their independence”.

The conclusions are made in a report from the Independent Transport Commission, alongside the Office of Rail and Road, into attitudes towards different forms of transport.

It follows the publication of statistics from the Department for Transport showing that the proportion of 17 to 20-year-olds with a driving licence has dipped over the past two decades. In 2013, 31 per cent held a licence, compared with almost half in 1992. Among over-70s, the proportion of driving-licence holders had risen from 33 per cent to 62 per cent. In the mid-1970s it was 15 per cent.

“The research demonstrates that young people are ‘falling out of love’ with the car, and place greater weight on alternative consumer products, while older people see the car as an important part of their lifestyle,” the commission’s study said.

Researchers interviewed almost 4,700 people for the report, which sought to set out the factors behind changing travel trends.

They found examples of young people being quoted huge amounts for insurance. One 20-year-old, a Post Office worker from Manchester, said that he was quoted £5,394 for comprehensive car insurance.

In urban areas, the researchers found that pensioners often owned a car but were less likely to rely on them as they used free bus passes and senior rail discounts.

No Car

Kurt and Kati live in Denver, and until recently they owned a car, like 88% of households in the city. What's remarkable is that last month they decided to go car-free, and so far they're loving the experience. Kurt has written a great piece about his experience, and I found it inspiring enough to want to share it with you.

Like most families that have grown dependent on a car, the challenge was figuring out how to meet all transportation needs with other things. After some planning and experimentation, they conclude: "Turned out B-cycle [bike sharing], RTD [bus and rail], Bustang, Lyft, Uber, Car2Go, and ZipCar would suffice."

If you’re thinking of going carless, it’s tempting to fixate on trips that seem the most challenging without an engine — heading to the mountains, for example. Don’t do that. It’s discouraging. Instead, arrange all the trips you take in a year into a pyramid, with the most frequent trips (like your commute) at the bottom. Replace those trips first. Next, work your way up, replacing trips that repeat weekly, like the grocery store. Already you’ve replaced 75 percent of your car trips, which you’ll realize are only to a few different destinations. This discovery builds confidence.

The tip of the pyramid usually consists of trips that require a major haul, like furniture, or trips that take you beyond the reaches of Denver’s transportation network. Car sharing works well for hauling. For long-distance, overnight trips where carpooling isn’t an option, renting a car makes sense. The savings of not owning a car are insane. We can rent one for a weekend every month if we want and still come out ahead. And the cost of a single month of our (former) car insurance coverage buys an entire year of the gold-plated B-cycle membership.

Survey Reveals What Drivers Want

AMERICANS WANT SELF-DRIVING cars. Not because they’ll save loads of time or ease the commute nightmare, but because it will save them money.

Of the 1,500 US drivers the Boston Group surveyed in September, 55 percent said they “likely” or “very likely” would buy a semi-autonomous car (one capable of handling some, but not all, highway and urban traffic). What’s more, 44 percent said they would, in 10 years, buy a fully autonomous vehicle.

What’s most surprising about the survey isn’t that so many people are interested in this technology, but why they’re interested.

The leading reason people are considering semi-autonomous vehicles isn’t greater safety, improved fuel efficiency, or increased productivity—the upsides most frequently associated with the technology. Such things were a factor, but the biggest appeal is lower insurance costs. Safety was the leading reason people were interested in a fully autonomous ride, with cheaper insurance costs in second place. (Reasons not to want a robo-ride include fear of hacking, distrust of the technology, and good old love of driving.)

This is unexpected, because how insurance will shake out usually is on the “tricky things to be figured out” side of the ledger, alongside how the government will test and regulate the vehicles. The current insurance business model—car owner has insurance to protect himself from the risk of causing a crash—doesn’t make sense if the computer’s in charge. And if we can make cars that rarely crash, do we even need insurance? We certainly won’t need to spend as much on it (currently about $800 a year, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners).

But just as automakers are sneakily getting us to accept self-driving cars, insurers are quietly adapting to the change.

In the near term, semi-autonomous features—blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance—will lead to fewer crashes. That reduces costs for insurers, says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Group’s North America automotive division. That’s why you see lower premiums for safe driving records, and discounts for having things like anti-lock brakes.

The XC90 is the first car in the world with technology that features automatic braking if the driver turns left (or right in left-hand traffic) in front of an oncoming car. This is a common scenario both in in busy city crossings and on highways. The all-new Volvo XC90 detects a potential crash and brakes automatically in order to avoid a collision or mitigate the consequences in a crash.

That’s why “a vast number of insurance companies” are exploring discounts for those semiautonomous features, Mosquet says. For example, drivers who purchase a new Volvo with the pedestrian protection tech qualify for a lower premium. “The cost to [the insurer] of pedestrian accidents is actually significant, and they’re going to do everything they can to reduce this type of incident.” That’s already started in Europe and is spreading to the US.

The tricky part for insurers is figuring out how much each advanced driver assistance system feature is worth to them. Boston Consulting Group is helping with those calculations, and it’s not a major hurdle.

The harder question comes when we hand over nearly all the driving to our robots. Liability—who’s responsible in a crash—will be an issue. What will likely happen, Mosquet says, is a shift from driver liability to product liability, so blame and cost will be assigned to the automaker, or whatever supplier is at fault in the event of a crash. Figuring out whom to blame, exactly, won’t be easy, and regulators will likely step in. Again, a tricky situation, but nothing that will stop progress.

So yes, we’ll be rewarded financially for giving up the wheel. But in the long run, as fully autonomous cars take over our roads, the insurance companies will have to adapt. They can’t argue against saving lives, but “they’re very, very concerned,” says David Carlisle, chairman of the board of auto industry consultancy Carlisle & Company. “If the car can’t wreck anymore, those premiums have got to go down drastically.”

We’re not sure just yet how they’ll stay in business (higher flood insurance premiums to go along with sea level rise?), but we’re glad that letting the robot drive won’t just keep us alive and productive on the road—it’ll save us money, too.

Winning Them Over

For a glimpse of one of the auto world's thorniest modern dilemma, look no further than two contradictory TV ads for Infiniti's new Q50.

In one, a narrator mocks the biggest trend in cars, self-driving technology, as boring and overbearing, taking "the wheel right from your very hands." In another, a man celebrates the fact that the Q50 can speed up, steer and stop on its own, via upgrades that show the luxury sedan has an "instinct to protect."

It is a revealing display of the problem that automakers face in selling a technology that is arriving far faster than many expected. The fully automated car may seem like a dream of the future, but early versions are already rolling into showrooms, whether buyers are ready or not.

Volvo now sells an SUV, the XC90, that stops at red lights, accelerates at green lights and can match the steering of cars ahead. Tesla Model S sedans will download "autopilot" features over the air this summer. Next year, Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz will offer models that can drive on autopilot, hands-free, and even park themselves.

The new tech heralds a big change in the way drivers relate to their cars. Few features threaten the traditional promise of the automobile - freedom, independence, control of the road - like a computer that can drive far safer and has no qualms about taking the wheel.

That has put automakers in an awkward spot to reach car buyers who are drawn to the idea of driving with fewer dangers and drudgeries but are still leery of self-driving technology. To win them over, carmakers increasingly are selling the illusion of control while, in practice, taking more and more away.

"The technology is probably the easiest problem to solve," said Jeremy Carlson, a senior analyst for IHS Automotive. "Consumer acceptance might be the hardest."

Cars and trucks with driver-assisting technology, a recent Boston Consulting Group report predicts, will hit the roads in "large numbers" by 2017 and at increasingly affordable prices.

Packages that sold for $4,000 a few years ago now leave the lot at half the price. Lexus's new RX will offer upgrades that stop the SUV in case of a potential crash and sound an alarm if it veers out of lane for about $500.

Rather than one revelatory self-driving debut, analysts believe this steady march of what the industry calls "semi-driverless" upgrades will persuade people to finally give up the wheel.

Loaded with cameras, sensors and computing power, the cars have, in tests, performed sharper and more consistently than human drivers without fear of drowsiness, drunkenness or distraction.

Yet the tension comes from a puzzling inconsistency traced in a survey by AutoTrader.com, which found that although most Americans say they are unnerved by ceding total control to a driverless car, they're happy to pay for all the piecemeal upgrades on which that car is built.

"When polls ask about driverless cars, people are nervous, they're fearful," said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst with AutoTrader. "But when you ask them about all these individual technologies - lane assist, helped parking - they say, yeah, we want all those."

Researchers at HERE, a Nokia offshoot building maps for self-driving cars, also found a similar impression in surveys. Drivers still believe that cars make their lives easier, more free, more fun - though they also crave the next big thing, even if it weirds them out.

Industry officials acknowledge that self-driving cars may never be universally accepted by drivers, especially those who value being in control of their car. In the self-driving mode of Mercedes' F 015 concept car, for instance, passengers can't steer or brake and can use a touchscreen to request the car to speed up or slow down - but only if the car thinks that's a good idea.

But engineers have made efforts to make the driverless tech act more familiar and human. In some earlier Volvos, for instance, the automatic brakes allowed such a wide and safe distance from the car ahead that the feature annoyed many drivers, who ended up disengaging it altogether.

The updated feature stops the car far closer, Volvo technology spokesman Jim Nichols said, in hopes "the driver doesn't have the desire to turn the feature off."

Where the cars once made their decisions silently, they have begun to sound out their thinking in ways that drivers can understand. Cars will now explain their sudden slowing by saying, for instance, "Crosswalk ahead," and dashboard screens will show directions and obstacles such as construction or broken-down vehicles.

But they are also designed not to be overly obtrusive. If too many unsignaled lane changes or other errors lead the safety system in Volvo's newer S60 sedans to believe its driver is losing attentiveness, the car's dashboard will flash a coffee cup and the words, "Time for a break."

For the XC90, Volvo's "semi-driverless" crossover SUV, sound engineers measured drivers' reaction times and led focus groups in several countries to gauge which of a series of specialized chimes showed the "appropriate urgency." The big question: Should warning sounds be calming and subtle, to not shock the passenger, or shrill and insistent, to underscore how important it is for the computer to take the wheel?

The answer, Volvo's Nichols said, was both. The car was given "psychoacoustic design elements" to heighten drivers' focus on their surroundings when necessary, while less-urgent sounds were designed to be "much more calming, almost a melody."

Automakers' worry concerning the mixed feelings about driverless technology has kept several big safety improvements off American roads.

In Europe, Ford sells cars with sign-reading "Intelligent Speed Limiters" that ensure drivers can't sail above the speed limit. Yet despite the safety benefits, Ford has not rolled the tech onto American roads because of concerns that drivers here may simply steer clear.

"There's not a technical impediment," said Alan Hall, a Ford spokesman. "The most important part is if they're willing to pay for it."

Ultimately, car companies and their engineers hope the benefits of driverless technology, which offers a relief from the annoyances of highway commutes and heavy traffic, will persuade buyers to let go of the wheel.

"Today, when you sit in a car, it doesn't feel like freedom. You feel frustrated. What you'd rather do, you can't do, because you're stuck in a traffic jam," said Erik Coelingh, a Volvo senior technical leader in Sweden. "I don't know if it's old-fashioned, but we still think it's a lot of fun to drive a car. For many customers that . . . is really important. We don't want to take that away."

Changing Attitudes To Car Ownership

Most Trips

Recreation

US - Teenagers No Longer Car Crazy

Britain - Young Don't Want To Own

No Car

Survey Reveals What Drivers Want

Winning Them Over

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