By The Time Your Car Goes Driverless, You Won't Know The Difference

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Driverless cars, once a futuristic sci-fi concept like smartphones and tablet computers before them, are closer than ever to becoming a reality. Tech companies and traditional car companies are developing automobiles that might someday give the blind and disabled greater mobility and be able to drive the kids to soccer practice.

FRESH AIR tech contributor Alexis Madrigal looks at the current state of car automation, as well as what's just down the road.

ALEXIS MADRIGAL, BYLINE: If you've heard about autonomous vehicles, cars that drive themselves, you probably associate them with Google, which is working on fully autonomous vehicles that will drive us to and fro while we're safely texting on our Android phones from the passenger seat.

Not to be outdone by a tech company, the traditional carmakers have major development programs, too. The Mercedes S500 Intelligent Drive concept vehicle recently drove 100 kilometers between German cities. Nissan has promised some kind of autonomous vehicle by 2020, and GM's ENV concept car is a funny little electric pod that would detect pedestrians in a crosswalk and automatically slow the vehicle. It could also communicate with smart infrastructure and traffic optimization apps to, say, detect that a drawbridge is up and plot a route around it.

Ford imagines packs of vehicles sensing their surroundings with stubby, horn-like antennae and communicating about traffic conditions amongst themselves. There are a lot of steps, however, between Henry Ford's Model T and Google's autonomous Model X. Carmakers need to figure out how to make vehicle-to-vehicle communication work, prove the safety and reliability of new technologies and make them cheaper.

Google's cars use tens of thousands of dollars worth of sensors. They also require a level of trust in the onboard computer that I at least find it difficult to muster. And let's not forget the problems of insuring a vehicle without a driver. Most of us, then, are going to encounter autonomous driving in little autopilot moments when we cede temporary control to a computer.

In the near future, cars will take over for us in those special driving situations that teenagers practice for their driver's test. Parallel parking? Let the car find the perfect angle of approach. Squeezing into a tight space? Hop out and press a button on your smartphone. Already in Nissan's new vehicles, the car detects when you've mis-steered into a turn and silently guides the wheels along a better trajectory.

In the Volkswagen Passat, a technology detects the lane markings on the road with a front-mounted camera and gently counter-steers if you begin to wander from your lane. Where Volkswagen is pushing the furthest, though, is in its Audi luxury car line. Some models already have an advance cruise control that uses a long-range radar system to detect other cars and automatically adjust one's speed to maintain a safe following distance.

And they're going further. I was recently invited to a demonstration of their newest generation of research projects. In the parking lot of Candlestick Park, south of San Francisco, I was riding in the back of a fancy Audi, following another Audi through two lines of orange cones. As the car in front of us stopped, the lanky German driving our car indicated that he was going to look away from the road and slam on the accelerator, and he did, and we did not crash.

That's because two cameras mounted near the rear- and side-view mirrors had detected the movement of the driver's head, meaning his eyes, away from the front of the car and, using software developed at the University of California San Diego, had told the car's onboard computer to switch into autopilot.

As our driver pumped his knee up and down, wildly pressing on the accelerator, the car came to a perfectly smooth stop and waited for our man to take back control of the car. The larger point is that futuristic visions distract us from the ways in which cars are already making decisions for us. With each new generation of vehicles, they're taking on more and more tasks, proving themselves in particular situations.

By the time Google's cars arrive in your driveway, you'll be acclimated to the idea of an artificial intelligence grabbing the wheel because you'll have handed over control tens of thousands of times. That's not to say that the transition will be smooth or without consequence but that the many technical, legal and personal hurdles that autonomous cars face will be worked out in much more limited settings, like the blacktop of the Candlestick parking lot or in the moment when you drift from a lane.

This is how the future creeps into the present. While it might seem like your main computing device transformed from a Dell desktop into a smartphone overnight, there were thousands of little steps along the way that led to the moment when you realized the world has changed beyond recognition.

GROSS: Alexis Madrigal is a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society and a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he edits the tech section of their website. You can watch a video of one of the cars he mentioned on our website, freshair.npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.