Self-Drive Cars

Why We need Self-Drive Cars

• People invariably react defensively when confronted with something new that upsets their established ideas of how the world works.
  
  When the first automobiles appeared they had plenty of negatives - they were expensive, hard to start, often broke down, and gasoline was hard to find.
  
  Many simply found them frightening.
  
  But there were problems with the existing technology - horse transport. They were expensive to maintain, and disposal of their manure was a major concern.
  
  Automobile technology improved to the point where they were clearly a better alternative, and the horse was relegated to the racetrack and pony club.
  
  Exactly the same process is underway with autonomous cars.
  
  The drawbacks of conventional cars are obvious - they are grossly inefficient, they clog highways and human drivers cause lots of accidents.
  
  Autonomous cars will solve multiple problems. Computer-controlled cars will radically increase highway capacity (smaller cars travelling much closer together) and reduce accident costs (human error causes 95% of road accidents).

• When discussing self-driving cars, people tend to ask a lot of superficial questions: how much will these cars cost? Is this supposed to replace my car at home? Is this supposed to replace taxis or Uber? What if I need to use a drive-thru?
  
  They ignore the smarter questions.
  They ignore the fact that 45% of disabled people in the US still work.
  They ignore the fact that 95% of a car's lifetime is spent parked.
  They ignore how this technology could transform the lives of the elderly,
  or eliminate the need for parking lots or garages or gas stations.
  They dismiss the entire concept because they don't think a computer could ever be as good at merging on the freeway as they are.
  
  They ignore the great, big, beautiful picture staring them right in the face: that this technology could make our lives so much better.

Automatic cars could be the great public-health achievement of the 21st century

• If driverless cars deliver on their promise to eliminate the vast majority of fatal traffic accidents, the technology will rank among the most transformative public-health initiatives in human history. But how many lives, realistically, will be saved?
  
  By the end of this century, there’s good reason to believe that tens of millions of traffic fatalities will be prevented around the world.
  
  This is not merely theoretical. There’s already some precedent for change of this magnitude in the realms of car culture and automotive safety. In 1970, about 60,000 people died in traffic accidents in the United States. A dramatic shift toward safety—including required seat belts and ubiquitous airbags—helped vastly improve a person’s chance of surviving the American roadways in the decades that followed. By 2013, 32,719 people died in traffic crashes, a historic low.
  
  Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that's nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.
  
  The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth cohort, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
  
  Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.
  
  “By midcentury, the penetration of [autonomous vehicles] and other [advanced driver-assistance systems] could ultimately cause vehicle crashes in the United States to fall from second to ninth place in terms of their lethality ranking among accident types,” wrote Michele Bertoncello and Dominik Wee in a paper for the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. Bertoncello and Wee further estimate that better road safety will save as much as $190 billion a year in health-care costs associated with accidents.
  
  Of course, all this relies on widespread adoption of driverless cars, which is as much a cultural hurdle as a technological one. As Andrew Moore, the computer science dean at Carnegie Mellon recently told me, “No one is going to want to realize autonomous driving into the world until there’s proof that it’s much safer, like a factor of 100 safer, than having a human drive.”
  
  And even then, there are complex questions to consider. People are still establishing frameworks for how to think about responsibility in a driverless world. Even with cars that are a factor of 100 safer than their manned predecessors, fatal accidents will happen.
  
  “There will be situations where a car knows that it's about to crash and will be planning how it crashes,” Moore said. “There will be incredible scrutiny on the engineers who wrote the code to deal with the crash. Was it trying to save its occupant? Was it trying to save someone else?”
  
  Moore suggests the driverless car revolution will hit a snag—setting it back at least a few years—after the first high-profile fatalities. Others have made similar predictions. It may be during the transition to wider-spread driverless adoption that autonomous vehicles are least trusted and roads are most dangerous.
  
  “During the transition period when conventional and self-driving vehicles would share the road, safety might actually worsen, at least for the conventional vehicles,” wrote Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, transportation researchers at the University of Michigan, in a paper earlier this year.
  
  After all, even a machine with a sterling driving record can’t account entirely for human error. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has learned this lesson first hand. Its cars have driven in autonomous mode for more than 1 million miles since 2009. In all that time, they’ve been involved in 16 accidents through August—none of which were caused by the self-driving car.
  
  All this suggests that, despite the growing pains ahead, the promise of driverless cars remains enormous—and within reach.

Road Deaths Increasing Because of Phones

• Pedestrians’ failure to look where they are going — and careless drivers who fail to spot them — have contributed to the rise in deaths and injuries on roads over the past year.
  
  The number of accidents caused by drivers and pedestrians “failing to look” has risen by 12 per cent over the past decade, according to figures from the Department for Transport.
  
  Road safety campaigners have blamed in-car gadgets, a more comfortable driving experience and pedestrians glued to their smartphones for increasing carelessness. “Sometimes people, and particularly drivers, become very complacent,” said Edmund King, president of the AA. “Cars are easier to drive, more comfortable and sometimes the driver relaxes.
  
  “One thing we have been worried about is the rise of iPod zombies. These are pedestrians who have earplugs in or iPhones out. They are listening to music or texting and they are not concentrating on traffic on the road. Walk down the road and 50 per cent of people are on their phones. One wonders what we did before the mobile phone. Maybe we looked around a bit more.”
  
  In 2014, 194,477 drivers, pedestrians or passengers were involved in road accidents; the figure for the previous year was 183,670. As The Times reported on Monday, 1,775 people were killed and 22,807 were seriously injured in road accidents last year. This was a rise of more than 5 per cent and only the second year-on-year rise since 2005.
  
  Across all reported accidents, road users failing to look properly was the most frequently reported single contributory factor to a crash, being blamed in 44 per cent of accidents. This compares with 32 per cent 10 years ago. In accidents where a pedestrian was killed or injured, pedestrians failed to look properly in 59 per cent of cases.
  
  The AA called for road safety to be taught on the national curriculum to reduce accidents and casualties. Mr King said: “More teenagers die in road accidents than knife crime, HIV or drugs, so as a life skill road safety is key, but we don’t spend much time on it.”
  
  Andrew Jones, the transport minister, said: “Britain continues to have some of the safest roads in the world. But behind every statistic is a personal tragedy, so we are determined to do more. Thanks to new laws, police now have tougher powers to tackle drink and drug driving and there are increased penalties for speeding and for using a mobile phone at the wheel.

Increasingly Crowded Roads

• It's not just the usual increase in cars on the road; the popularity of internet shopping is driving a large rise in the number of small vans and “megatrucks” on British roads.
  
  Figures from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency show that almost 3.5 million small delivery vehicles were registered in the UK last year, up by a quarter in ten years. There was also a five-fold increase in the number of the very biggest lorries — 44 tonnes — on the road last year compared with a decade earlier.
  
  Experts said the rise in “little and large” vehicles reflected Britain’s increasing shift towards online shopping, with huge trucks needed to feed vast distribution centres, while the “white van man” made home deliveries.
  
  Separate figures from the Department for Transport showed that traffic levels in towns and cities were up by 2.3 per cent in the past year. The average speed on major roads during the morning rush hour is now less than 24mph and only 15mph in London.
  
  BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions, which carried out the analysis, said the boom in online shopping was being driven by the likes of Amazon, Asos, John Lewis and Tesco, which have all built huge distribution centres to manage the process.
  
  Clothing retailers in particular are sending dozen of items from warehouses to customers’ homes, even though the majority of items are sent back after being tried on, the experts claimed.
  
  Tristan Watkins, BNP Paribas’s UK manager, said: “At one end of the supply chain, retailers and haulage companies are investing more in larger vehicles. “At the distribution end there is much more demand for fleets of smaller vans capable of delivering orders to strict schedules and the kind of tight delivery windows that consumers are increasingly coming to expect.”
  
  According to official figures, there were 3.45 million vans registered in the UK last year, compared with 2.79 million in the year before. In addition, 921 of the very heaviest HGVs were registered with the DVLA, compared with only 179 a decade earlier.
  
  Smaller, self-drive cars will replace the plethora of delivery vans with computer co-ordinated trips that can be scheduled and rearranged to fit changing road usage patterns - they can deliver at off-peak or evening times, and they can be re-directed around temporary bottlenecks.

Cars Spend Most of Time Parked

• Studies have shown that vehicles spend a substantial percentage of time parked rather than being driven. The calculations were made based upon the number of hours that the average car is in motion. Subtract that from the average lifespan and you get the percentage of parking time.
  
  The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) Foundation in UK reported in 2012 that the typical UK car is parked 96.5% of the time.
  
  According to the 1995 UITP Millennium Cities Database, the percentage of cars parked in 84 cities around the world was 95.8%, with cars being in motion for 61 minutes a day.
  
  In Singapore, the percentage time a car is parked is 94% followed by Seoul and China with 92.3% and 89.4% respectively.