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 This isn't damning with faint praise. It's actually high praise for
the car in question: Google Inc.'s driverless car.
Most automotive test drives (of which I've done dozens while
covering the car industry for nearly 30 years) are altogether
different.
There's a high-horsepower car. A high-testosterone automotive
engineer. And a high-speed race around a test track by a boy-racer
journalist eager to prove that, with just a few more breaks, he
really could have been, you know, a NASCAR driver.
This test drive, in contrast, took place on the placid streets of
Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town that houses Google's
headquarters.
The engineers on hand weren't high-powered "car guys" but
soft-spoken Alpha Geeks of the sort that have emerged as the
Valley's dominant species. And there wasn't any speeding even
though, ironically, Google's engineers have determined that speeding
actually is safer than going the speed limit in some circumstances.
"Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every
year," said Dmitri Dolgov, the project's boyish Russian-born lead
software engineer, who now is a U.S. citizen, describing his sense
of mission. "This could change that."
Dolgov, who's 36 years old, confesses that he drives a Subaru
instead of a high-horsepower beast. Not once during an hour-long
conversation did he utter the words "performance," "horsepower," or
"zero-to-60," which are mantras at every other new-car test drive.
Instead Dolgov repeatedly invoked "autonomy," the techie term for
cars capable of driving themselves.
Google publicly disclosed its driverless car program in 2010, though
it began the previous year. It's part of the company's "Google X"
division, overseen directly by co-founder
Sergey Brin and devoted to "moon shot" projects by the Internet
company, as Dolgov puts it, that might take years, if ever, to bear
fruit.
So if there's a business plan for the driverless car, Google isn't
disclosing it. Dolgov, who recently "drove" one of his autonomous
creations the 450 miles (725 km) or so from Silicon Valley to Tahoe
and back for a short holiday, simply says his mission is to perfect
the technology, after which the business model will fall into place.
NOT WINNING BEAUTY CONTESTS, YET
Judging from my non-eventful autonomous trek through Mountain View,
the technology easily handles routine driving. The car was a Lexus
RX 450h, a gas-electric hybrid crossover vehicle - with special
modifications, of course.
There's a front-mounted radar sensor for collision avoidance. And
more conspicuously, a revolving cylinder perched above the car's
roof that's loaded with lasers, cameras, sensors and other detection
and guidance gear. The cylinder is affixed with ugly metal struts,
signaling that stylistic grace, like the business plan, has yet to
emerge.
But function precedes form here, and that rotating cylinder is a
reasonable replacement for the human brain (at least some human
brains) behind the wheel of a car.
During the 25-minute test ride the "driver's seat" was occupied by
Brian Torcellini, whose title, oddly, is "Lead Test Driver" for the
driverless car project.
Before joining Google the 30-year-old Torcellini, who studied at San
Diego State University, had hoped to become a "surf journalist."
Really. Now he's riding a different kind of wave. He sat behind the
test car's steering wheel just in case something went awry and he
had to revert to manual control. But that wasn't necessary.
Dolgov, in the front passenger's seat, entered the desired
destination to a laptop computer that was wired into the car. The
car mapped the route and headed off. The only excitement, such as it
was, occurred when an oncoming car seemed about to turn left across
our path. The driverless car hit the brakes, and the driver of the
oncoming car quickly corrected course.
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I sat in the back seat, not my usual test-driving position, right
behind Torcellini. The ride was so smooth and uneventful that,
except for seeing his hands, I wouldn't known that the car was
completely piloting itself - steering, stopping and starting - lock,
stock and dipstick.
Google's driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed
limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when
other cars are going much faster actually can be
dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph
(16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant.
'NOT A TOY'
In addition to the model I tested - and other such adapted versions
of conventional cars - Google also has built little bubble-shaped
test cars that lack steering wheels, brakes and accelerator pedals.
They run on electricity, seat two people and are limited to going 25
mph (40 kph.) In other words, self-driving golf carts.
Google's isn't the only driverless car in development. One of the
others is just a few miles away at Stanford University (where Dolgov
did post-doctoral study.) Getting the cars to
recognize unusual objects and to react properly in abnormal
situations remain significant research challenges, says professor J.
Christian Gerdes, faculty director of Stanford's REVS Institute for
Automotive Research.
Beyond that, there are "ethical issues," as he terms them. "Should a
car try to protect its occupants at the expense of hitting
pedestrians?" Gerdes asks. "And will we accept it when
machines make mistakes, even if they make far fewer mistakes than
humans? We can significantly reduce risk, but I don't think we can
drive it to zero."
That issue, in turn, raises the question of who is liable when a
driverless car is involved in a collision - the car's occupants, the
auto maker or the software company. Legal issues might be almost as
vexing as technical ones, some experts believe.
Self-driving cars could appear on roads by the end of this decade,
predicted a detailed report on the budding driverless industry
issued late last year by investment bank Morgan Stanley. Other
experts deem that forecast extremely optimistic.
But cars with "semi-autonomous" features, such as
collision-avoidance radar that maintains a safe distance from the
car ahead, are already on the market. And the potential advantages -
improved safety, less traffic congestion and more - are winning
converts to the autonomy cause.
"This is not a toy," declared the Morgan Stanley research report.
"The social and economic implications are enormous."
For video of a car similar to the one tested, see http://reut.rs/YfiJez
Paul Ingrassia, managing editor of Reuters, is the author of three
books on automobiles, and has been covering the industry since 1985.
The car he drives is ... a red one.
(Reporting by Paul Ingrassia; Editing by Frances Kerry)
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