The end of autonomous cars as we know it
Autonomous cars are cool aren’t they?
No accidents, Free to work and play on traffic jams, On-demand, No maintenance, Cheap to own and who cares about parking?
The vision is great and the path towards making is reality went through defining different autonomous levels, You see we couldn’t imagine self-driving cars just a few years back so we had to pave the engineering path for making it happen, The time is up. These cars are already killing people and scale hasn’t even begun yet so with current trends more people will keep dying while technology enabling takes place.
Short recap — What are the autonomous driving levels?
Level 0 — Today (ish)
Level 1 — Joint driving of the car and the driver like cruise or auto parking.
Level 2 — Hands off, Car drives but the driver is monitoring
Level 3 — Eyes off, Car is driving and the driver can do whatever he likes as long as he will be prepared to intervene
Level 4 — The car is fully autonomous in restricted areas.
Level 5 — The car is fully autonomous
While these levels pave nicely the engineering progress towards autonomous cars they have little to do with reality, This is a very common problem in technology, focusing on tech milestones but postponing usability, user experience and the person that actually using the product.
These levels have 0 meaning when it comes to the potential car users out there.
Why these levels has no meaning from user’s side?
In mobile app world, there is a saying: “Test on the young, old … and drunk”. This has a lot of wisdom in it, In order for technology to truly reach everyone it has to be seamless, friction-less and intuitive, But self-driving cars are different — They can kill the user or someone who just passed by, So the usability bar is way higher compared to your TODO or assistant mobile apps.
Users need a super clear definition what to do, Complete safety if they fail to do it and on no circumstances be responsible for the results. The vision is to transform drivers to users and if you ever worked with users you know: They tend to have no discipline, take unexpected actions and in generally exploring your technology corner cases and limitations, Many times without even understanding they are doing it.
The new autonomous driving levels
No need for numbers here as it is a simple Yes/No question, Does the car drives by itself ?
All other aspects of location restrictions, environmental limits, weather, traffic rules and regulation are all embedded in simply answer yes or no.
All cars today are none autonomous
Putting aside development kits and initial pilots there are no commercially available autonomous cars, Waymo, Autonomous car leader seems to get there fast but it is in its beginning.
Most cars will keep being released under this category and this includes cars who are already embedding cool new ADAS features . While offering great value to the passengers, Safety and emergency capabilities do not make the car autonomous from user perspective.
What is an autonomous car?
We said its simple already so here it is:
You order from your location, State destination and get one of two answers:
- The service is not available on your route at the moment.
- A car is on the way, Confirm cost.
You get in, you get out. Sometimes the car stops for whatever reason, There are again two options:
- Take the wheel (if the car lets you)
- get out and find an alternative for the rest of your journey.
I know its a bit naive approach, But this is what it takes. Let’s take it to the next level of details.
How autonomous car will operate ?
Just like mentioned above but there is still one piece missing, How do we create synchronization between the human driver and autonomous driver?
At the core of the problem there are no clear boundaries and in order to allow humans and cars drive together with a clear, human-independent boundary is needed.
The car has two modes :
- Autonomous driving, You can go to sleep.
- You are driving, Keep the damn phone away.
So the main question is how do we transit between the two?
From manual to automatic its easy, Driver is noticed and upon approval car takes over. But what happens when going back to manual? The driver is asleep …
Who drives the car?
This sounds simple, two options question but it actually has 3 :
- The car is driving
- You are driving
- No one is driving
The industry is kind of ignoring the 3rd option but its the most important one in order to bring these cars to production. The transition between autonomous (#1) to manual (#2) goes through #3.
What happens when no one is driving ?
The car stops, Safely for both passengers and outsiders. This sounds simple but presents a bit more complex problem: The car has to guarantee it can stop autonomously once it has entered into autonomous mode, The car has to predict the future.
Summarizing
I took a bit naive and drastic approach here but someone told me once: “The best way to deliver a message is to exaggerate and simplify”. Self-driving cars has started killing people and this is likely to accelerate, The industry and regulators will have to take full responsibility and make sure these machines are safe, as the concept of “We drive, You watch” is dead.
Eran, Dataloop.ai CEO