The self-driving car is a proposition too enticing for society at large to ignore. Lotus Seven enthusiast and new CEO of Google’s self-driving-car project John Krafcik sees it as the way forward, citing the need to sell on safety. But Krafcik didn’t say much else at the presentation following our ride in the tech giant’s autonomous vehicle, leaving it to the folks who’d been working on the program since it began in 2009. In his own words, “You don’t have to listen to me talk hardly at all.”
Built by Roush in Livonia, Michigan, Google’s wee nugget of a thing reminds us more of college-student-proof furniture than an actual vehicle, right down to the teal plastic accents in the interior. They’re a nigh-exact color match to the trim at UC Santa Cruz’s College Eight circa 1993, a throwback to the era before Google existed, when tech-savvy students were using text-based browsers and UCSC’s Infoslug gopher to wiggle their way around the internet. When the World Wide Web was just another thing you could log onto. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still Stanford undergrads.
Twenty-odd years later, this hat-shaped thing rolls up to us in the rooftop parking lot of one of Google’s Mountain View, California buildings. The coupe-length door opens via a pillar-mounted handle. The sheer size of the portal makes ingress a breeze. Once inside, we’re greeted with an expansive, slightly distorted view via a flexible, pedestrian-impact-friendly windshield. The whole thing feels a bit like a Renault Twizy re-imagined as a side-by-side.
Where the steering wheel, dash, and pedals would be, there’s simply a bin with a screen mounted over it, showing an approximation of what the car sees, largely gleaned from its laser-scanning sensors. On the center console, there’s an emergency-stop switch, shrouded by a clear plastic cover, controls for seat heaters, some buttons featuring people wearing headsets that the Google folks wouldn’t explain, and a black, backlit button proclaiming, “GO.”
We mashed “GO,” the car responded with a brief countdown, and off we went around the parking lot, whirring like a tiny BART train—at speeds below 25 mph. As such, any estimated skidpad numbers, 0-60 figures, and other performance prognostications are rendered wholly baseless, so we won’t make them. What was interesting and frankly impressive was exactly how surefooted the system felt. Mercedes-Benz’s Distronic Plus with Steering Assist, perhaps the best self-driving system on sale today, feels positively primitive, tentative, and sketchy compared to the authority with which GumNut the Koala Car goes about its business.
A man on a bicycle with a Rastafarian paint scheme shoots out from nowhere and the smartypants runabout slows its roll smoothly and surely, system unfazed by the two-wheeled miscreant. Its behavior is the result of 1.2 million miles traveled by the company’s autonomous fleet, a group of vehicles that continues to amass about 15,000 miles’ worth of data every week. And while your average C/D reader may log more miles than that over the course of a year, Joe Schmuck Commuter very likely doesn’t. The company points out that over the life of the program so far, it has amassed 90 years’ worth of driving experience. And unlike a 106-year-old driver, its servers’ reaction times are only getting faster.
Our recent ride in Mercedes’s F015 Luxury in Motion concept left us suspicious that a nearby blacked-out Sprinter hid a pack of Swabians huddled over a console, controlling the car’s movements. If there was a cadre of Google-ites joysticking this wheeled Pikachu to and fro, we’d be surprised. We’re pretty sure little GumNut was acting pretty much on its own, save its mandate to follow a pre-planned route with defined start and stop points.
Before our ride in the prototype, we went for a spin on city streets in one of Google’s Lexus RX development vehicles. The ‘utes are piloted by two-person teams, with one manning the controls and the other observing what the car “sees” on a laptop. And if the Lexus wasn’t quite as smooth as the Koalamobile, it was also faced with more demanding tasks, navigating neighborhoods, intersections, and other vehicles—vehicles driven by erratic, imperfect humans.
Part of the reason Google’s machines are so good—beyond the miles logged—is that they’re running on roads the company has mapped in great detail. Beyond the simple routes available in your phone’s Google Maps app, the highways and byways around the Bay Area have been intimately recorded, with information about curbs, islands, and even the road’s crown made available to the car, allowing it to predict a course, then modify it as it receives input from the sensor suite. In addition to GPS, the cars also feature an inertial navigation system with gyroscopes and accelerometers like you’d find in a plane or a submarine, allowing the car to pinpoint its location in concrete jungles and in tunnels, where GPS signals can be notoriously unreliable.
So is this little widget of an automatic automobile the future? Yes and no. It’s patently silly to think that self-driving vehicles aren’t the way forward. The potential societal benefits are too great. If nothing else, insurance companies hate to pay out, and autonomous vehicles have the potential to remove human fallibility from the equation. It’s a fool’s errand to believe that that Big Insurance won’t squeeze wallets and Washington to keep your hands off the tiller. Meanwhile, Google has gone on record that it doesn’t want to be in the car business; we’d expect the company to fall into the Tier I supplier realm, designing systems for automakers to install in their own vehicles.
The overarching question about all this is when, and for that, nobody has a definitive answer, although the Self-Driving Car Project’s director, Chris Urmson, says he’d like to see it on the roads in four years, so his now-twelve-year-old son doesn’t have to get a driver’s license when he turns sixteen. We’d be lying if that statement didn’t make our hearts sink.
Certainly, Google’s tech makes the mildly autonomous systems on sale today seem patently rudimentary in function. But we do have one request: Whatever the brave (or pusillanimous) autonomous future holds for us, might we spec it with less teal Tupperware, please?
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