Two Months of Driverless Cars, With Progress and Cogent Observations

This area has been heating up lately.  It’s been a good but limited year for autonomous vehicles, with those offering them mainly building on their robotaxi success.  What’s been happening?

On that, “Way more” (The Economist, October 4^th) discussed “the peculiar economics of self-driving taxis,” claiming that “the rise of autonomy has played out in two different ways.  First it has raised overall taxi demand in San Francisco.  Second, it has catered to a lucrative corner of the market.”  The number of rides in cabs with drivers stayed the same, and from 2023 to 2024 the count of people working in “taxi and limousine service” increased, 7%, leading Lyft’s CEO to say that autonomous taxis will “actually expand the market.” 

Moving along, “Could a driverless car deliver your next DoorDash?  New collab announced” (Michelle Del Rey, USA Today, October 16^th).  That company is combining with Waymo, to “launch the testing phase of an autonomous delivery service in the Phoenix metro area, with plans to expand it more broadly this year.”  Customers, if they are “in an eligible area,” can use the Waymo app’s “Autonomous Delivery Platform.”  As well as human “dashers,” DoorDash is already also making at least some deliveries with robots and drones.

On the other size end, an “AI truck system matches top human drivers in massive safety showdown with perfect scores” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, October 29^th).  Autonomous system Kodiak Driver’s rating, described as 98 on a 1-100 scale on the industry assessment VERA, “placed it beside the safest human fleets.”  The self-driving trucks have “advanced monitoring and hazard detection systems,” and have eliminated many human problems, such as “distraction, fatigue and delayed reaction.”  Nothing was provided, though, on how many of these trucks are running now, and whether they are being used for true production – but see three paragraphs below for one modest data point.

Now we can expect “Waymo to launch robotaxi service in Las Vegas, San Diego and Detroit in 2026” (Akash Sriram, USA Today, November 4^th).  The first two cities aren’t surprising, but can such vehicles deal with snow?  “In Detroit, the company said its winter-weather testing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has strengthened its ability to operate year-round.”  We will see if that place can really join “Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin,” where it “has completed more than 10 million trips.”

Miami is not in that group, but there, a “Sheriff’s office tests America’s first self-driving police SUV” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, November 6^th).  This “bold experiment” is a “year-long pilot program” of “the Police Unmanned Ground Vehicle Patrol Partner, or PUG,” which “is packed with high-tech features” including interfaces “with police databases, license plate readers and crime analytics software in real time,” and “can drive itself, detect suspicious activity through artificial intelligence-powered cameras and even deploy drones for aerial surveillance.”  A massive, if scary, potential help for law enforcement forces.

Are “Self-driving cars still out of reach despite years of industry promises” (Jackie Charniga, USA Today, November 25^th)?  Although “driverless semitrucks have traveled more than 1,000 miles hauling cargo between Dallas and Houston,” and robotaxis are established as above, “the unmanned vehicles circulating on American highways and side streets are a fraction of what executives promised in the giddy early days.”  We know that, though, and progress, on a more specialized and certainly slower track, is still real.  Don’t bet anything you don’t want to lose against improvement continuing indefinitely.

On the other hand, autonomous vehicles are still embarrassing themselves.  We now have “US investigating Waymo after footage captures self-driving cars illegally moving past school buses in Texas” (Bonny Cho, Fox Business, December 4^th).  Driverless technology has struggled mightily with understanding on a detailed level how human drivers think, and have not been able to quantify some great pieces of that, but why weren’t school buses, with telltale flashing lights and capability of being tagged in some way, long since identified and understood?  Were there none of them in the mile-square testing grounds where base autonomous software was developed?  This is the kind of thing which causes people to be overly fearful, and, if there are many more problems remaining at this stage, that’s justified.  I hope there are no more humiliations as low-level as this yet to emerge.

Ever since I first wrote about driverless technology, close to ten years ago, I have been making points about how beneficial it would be.  Avoiding the tens of thousands of annual deaths caused by human driver error was the main benefit, followed by higher general prosperity and allowing easier transportation of older children, those impaired, and others unable to drive.  As with when our current cars became the norm, we would not know all of self-driving’s effects, but many, such as reduced smoking as people would eventually not need to stop at gas stations where many now buy cigarettes, would be both probable and valuable.  I have been disappointed by overreactions to autonomous vehicles’ tiny amounts of fatalities, governmental unwillingness to allow the technology to progress, and general lacks of will and ability to see how many lives could be saved, but there has lately been, in two places, at least a small advance.

The first opinion piece was “Auto injuries are my job.  I want Waymo to put me out of work” (Marc Lamber, USA Today, November 21^st).  The author, with “a 34-year career as a plaintiff personal injury lawyer,” said his “calls have been heartbreakingly familiar:  a parent and spouse is paralyzed because someone was texting; a pedestrian on a sidewalk is killed because a driver had “just two drinks”; a family is shattered by speeding, fatigue or road rage.”  He pointed out that “autonomous driving technology doesn’t get drunk, distracted, tired or tempted to speed,” and that “a rare autonomous vehicle mistake dominates headlines while the daily toll of human driving error goes underreported.”  He mentioned that Waymo, “across 96 million miles without a human driver,” had “91% fewer serious injury crashes, 79% less airbag deployment crashes,” and “92% fewer injury-resulting pedestrian collisions,” along with “89% less injury-causing motorcycle collisions and 78% fewer injury-related cyclist crashes.”  Overall, “that is not perfection.  That is progress worth protecting.”

The second piece, published in the New York Times website on December 2^nd and in the Sunday print edition December 7^th, by Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, was, in the latter, “The Human Driver Is a Failed Experiment.”  He made many of the same points Lamber did, adding that “more than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes last year,” of which “the combined economic and quality-of-life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually, more than the entire U.S. military or Medicare budget.”  He said that “if 30 percent of cars were fully automated, it might prevent 40 percent of crashes,” and that “insurance markets will accelerate this transition, as premiums start to favor autonomous vehicles,” but “many cities are erecting roadblocks,” and “in a future where manual driving becomes uncommon, perhaps even quaint, like riding horses is today… we no longer accept thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of broken spines as the price of mobility.”  Ending, “it’s time to stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention.” 

Do we want this outcome?  If not, why not?