On Monday, September 12, Uber put 4 driverless Ford Fusion taxis on the road in Pittsburg. They weren’t totally driverless because they had a back up driver and an engineer in the front seats. The Fusions were modified with a great deal of hardware on the roof, developed by Uber and consisting of cameras and radar units. The plan is to provide service to the airport within a few months and to service the whole metro area in a year.
Does this mean the age of the driverless car has arrived? Not quite. There are a number of hurdles to get over. Since the beginning of the year, there have been two deaths in Tesla’s that were operating on Autopilot. One was in China in January and the other was in Florida in May. Tesla has since updated its software to keep the human driver “more engaged”. There are many opinions that this technology is coming onto public roadways too quickly. Mobileye, the company that manufactured cameras for Tesla, dissolved the relationship in July, stating that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety” according to a story in Automotive News.
Ford plans to market a self driving Fusion within 5 years that has no accelerator pedal, no brake pedal and no steering wheel. Can you imagine that in a snowstorm on Berthoud Pass?
The autopilot systems in airplanes took many years to develop and test. Aviation safety expert’s advice to the automotive industry is to proceed slowly and be sure drivers understand the limits of the technology. Adaptive cruise control, automatic braking and blind spot detection are fairly well developed but not so much lane departure. There are always going to be times where the human driver has to take back control of the vehicle due to conditions that the vehicle’s software cannot interpret such as weather conditions that obscure markings on the road. Studies have shown that this transition takes around 7 seconds, and at 60 mph the vehicle has traveled over 600 feet. That is over 1/10 of a mile.
