Googlebot autocar

It seems that nobody wants us to actually drive cars any more.  From Mercedes’ productionised “adaptive cruise control” and the Lexus that parks itself through to VW’s recent vision of the car as a shared community resource which I poked a bit of fun at recently there seems to be a fair amount of cybernews and views on the subject of getting robots (or inbuilt technology) to do the business of driving our cars.

None of this is new and the motivation for it is that very sage bit of safety advice from years ago that “the most dangerous part of a car is the nut behind the wheel”.  This was originally some form of validation for manufacturers not to fit seatbelts or collapsible steering columns or other basic safety features in the then new cars of the 1950s.  Now it seems since we have all the airbags, crumple zones, active braking systems and so forth that this last rogue element needs to be addressed!

Semi-surprisingly Google are on the case. Much like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes a trucker and discovers the hidden “Auto Drive” function in his big rig the world has discovered that Google has logged 140,000 miles on public roads with a car which drives itself.  A real person sits in the car to keep an eye on things.  Apparently switching from Google Driving to normal human control is as easy as switching off the cruise control.  I am reminded of an episode of Chips where the guys have to chase down a Lincoln Continental or similar which has its cruise control jammed on but I digress.  The big inhibitor to reverting to manual control has to be the fact that as soon as Joe Public gets his hands on this he’ll be literally asleep at the wheel.

Don't mess with Ponch.

The proponents of this technology tell us that globally we kill 1.2 billion people in road accidents every year and that driver error is the number one cause of accidents. If follows that taking the driver out of the equation makes for safer roads and also studies suggest that “road trains” of automated cars cruising would lower emissions than the stop-start fast-slow snarl of our congested highways.  Certainly I can’t imagine anyone could argue that driving on the M1 on a Friday afternoon is any form of “fun” motoring and the ability to press a button, slip into auto and catch up on some Zzzs or maybe read a book or watch TV is appealing.

Its the Prius if you hadn't guessed

But I’m still way far from comfortable with this...  I’ve seen I, Robot...

NY Times also carries the news