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DARPA and the Military
Why were DARPA and the military so interested in driverless vehicles in the first place?
A lot goes back to Sept. 11, 2001, when America was attacked on home soil, something that hasn’t happened too often in U.S. history. Many people came to the conclusion that these acts of terrorism were a direct symptom of America’s fossil fuel addiction. Of course, America’s leadership – represented by a president (No. 43) with close ties to the Texas oil industry – didn’t hear that message. Instead, his administration started two wars.
But wars against terrorists are slightly different from wars against regular armies. Especially if you want to prevent civilian casualties, which always looks bad on TV. Just as bad on TV are American soldiers coming home in caskets wrapped in Stars and Stripes. The military would have loved to prevent those pictures by sending quiet, electric, self-driving vehicles into areas with a high chance of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) or mines. But those weren’t available back then. And while remote-controlled vehicles can do some of it in specific environments, urban warfare often requires way more preparation, more car intelligence, and a gentler touch.
Viagra on Wheels
DARPA could have checked in with U.S. car manufacturers directly. But Detroit has been feeding into the oil addiction more than anybody. Detroit and its “Big Three” (GM, Ford, Chrysler) were never into that ‘modern’ stuff like ‘Transportation’ or ‘Urbanism.’ In their commercials, streets are always empty, and speed limits don’t exist. Today, Detroit is focusing on things like acceleration and exhilaration, freedom of the open road, freedom of empty city streets, bigger cars pulling bigger loads, manhood and self-esteem. While a European luxury car might be delivered with a set of golf clubs or expensive binoculars, every American V8 seems to come with a package of testosterone cigarettes or chewable steroids in the glove box.
Even if GM, Ford, and Chrysler were interested in the technology of electric vehicles (EVs) or autonomous vehicles (AVs), by 2008, they were belly under—their expensive fossil-fuel addiction basically almost killed them, and No. 43 and No. 44 had to bail them out.
DARPA, therefore, left it to the geeks from various universities and, eventually, Silicon Valley to figure all this urban self-driving stuff out. Now, the car manufacturers are playing catch-up, and so far they have mostly just ramped up their advertising:
2011 Dodge Charger – The Future of Driving – making fund of autonomous vehicles
2024 Hummer EV – it’s time to Push that Button – trying to look like more modern
Hope for a Safer Future
Ninety-two of households have a car and everyone claims they love driving and they couldn’t live without their cars. So what non-war-related purpose could self-driving, electric vehicles possibly ever have?
For once, in 1983, more than 80% of 18-year-olds owned a driver’s license; that number went to under 60% by 2021. Stereotypically, GenZ seems to love living and meeting online and the rest can do walking and biking in urban environments. There are still services like Public Transportation, ride-hailing, and now robot taxis.
It speaks volumes that Silicon Valley picked up on something that Detroit couldn’t see. Early on, the geeks might have mostly been interested in finding out if the technology behind Herbie and KIT could be replicated for real. But when Google X created Project Chauffeur, they started to put some thought and business sense behind robot cars, including general advantages and non-military use cases.
These are just a few advantages an electric autonomous vehicle (EV/AV) can hopefully provide:
- Safety by taking ‘Human Error’ out of driving.
- Saving Long Haul Trucking.
- Reducing labor costs for taxis, ride-hailing, and delivery services.
- Moving from owning cars to transportation-as-a-service.
- Saving families money on car ownership.
- Optimizing valuable urban space.
- Saving driving time (no need to look at maps or traffic).
- Saving parking time (no need to circle three times to park right in front of the store).
- Increased safety through Vehicle-2-Vehicle (V2V) communication.
- Vehicle-2-Grid Energy Storage (V2G)
Autonomous Driving means Safer Driving
The EU project from the 1990s called “Prometheus” naturally stands for ‘PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety’ – with a special focus on Unprecedented Safety. And Waymo gave their central processing unit, their driving brain, their AI the copyrighted name World’s Most Experienced Driver and with good reason. A Swiss insurance company concluded that Waymo’s AI is already driving better than humans do, which – to be honest – doesn’t sound that hard:
- Fifty million injuries worldwide are due to vehicle crashes. [2018]
- 1.35 million deaths worldwide due to vehicle crashes. [2016]
- Around 50% of deaths are vulnerable road users (motorcyclists, pedestrians, cyclists). [2016]
- Crashes are often caused by speeding, distraction, inattention, lack of sleep, alcohol, and drowsiness.
- This means that 94% of crashes in the US involve human choice or human error.
- Some statistics show that number is 98%.
There are very few ‘acts of God’ or real ‘accidents’ in Transportation. Most collisions and crashes are preventable through engineering. Separation of Speed and Power is basically the solution to almost all traffic problems.
The first excuse any human driver will use after a collision is “I didn’t see them“. Humans do have a commonly known brain damage – and it has to do with eyesight. Human eyesight is limited by speeding, distraction, inattention, alcohol, drowsiness or a combination of those. The Waymo Driver employs radar, infrared Lidar, ultrasonic, and peripheral cameras to get a 360-degree view of over 300 meters. Waymo’s sensors are on the outside in optimal spots where they “help maximize capability and safety.” Most importantly, the Waymo Driver never drinks, smokes, spills coffee, needs to do makeup, or listens to a game or podcast. Nothing can distract that thing.
America’s Long Haul Trucking Problem
It turns out that trucking isn’t as much fun as Convoy, Smokey, and Spielberg’s Duel made it look like. It’s actually hard work, and the U.S. has a shortage of truckers. This means there are plenty of companies that are especially interested in using AVs in Long Haul Trucking. One scenario could be that during a long drive on the highway, the truck driver could take a nap while the truck keeps going. Another example would be a human driver is there to get the truck through New York City and onto I-80. The AV truck would then get itself to Vallejo, where another human makes sure that truck gets through Oakland. Taking out all breaks would make trucking more efficient and cheaper. A trucking company could move more goods with the same number of drivers, and drivers could still spend their evenings with their families.
And we haven’t even mentioned all the different possibilities of AVs in agriculture and mining.
Cheap Labor
Real interesting are AVs for ride-hailing and taxi services, collection and delivery, and health services for people with disabilities. Currently, the highest costs for Uber, Lyft, and Dashdoor are the costs of hiring and retaining their drivers, doing background checks on them, or paying the lawsuits about drivers where the background check clearly failed. Autonomous vehicles could make this part much cheaper and safer. Eventually, Waymo, Cruise, Uber, and Lyft will be able to make more money and reduce many problems if they can take out the human element. Another advantage of AV is the fact that robot cars don’t fight each other for the best fares at the best times. Because AVs can drive 24/7 and never take sick days, they won’t have to entice drivers to take specific shifts nobody else wants.
Reducing the high cost of car ownership
Cars are notoriously bad investments. Cheaper, faster and more convenient ride-hailing services provided by taxis, shuttles, Waymo, Cruise, Uber, and Lyft would allow more people to avoid expensive car ownership. Even cheaper could be Public Transportation – but for Bay Area’s leadership, this isn’t exactly a top priority. Therefore, in this area, two cars are the norm for many family households, which, according to AAA, would cost an average of $24,000 annually. With higher costs in the Bay Area, those $24,000 per year can easily double over a lifetime, leading to seven-figure expenses. Switching from an ownership model to a transportation-as-a-service model could save millions of people millions of dollars. Just getting rid of one car and using the robot taxi instead could prepare families much better for retirement.
By transferring the cost of ownership to ride-hail service providers, they can make a car much more useful over its lifetime. That car won’t be standing around 94% of the time, and it will drive 500,000 miles during its lifetime rather than the 200,000 many private cars achieve before age sets in.
Congestion-free living and reducing need for Space
Parking is a huge waste of space. The US has more cars than licensed drivers. And since cars are standing around 95% of the time, they need parking or storage space. But as drivers, we expect empty and cheap parking wherever we go and whenever we decide to arrive. Those expectations led to 4-5 empty parking spots for every single car out there. And if there are 4-5 parking spots per car, that means 3-4 spots are always empty. That is a lot of wasted space that could be used to create a better return on investment (ROI).
In 2012, the Earth Institute published a research paper about the greater Ann Arbor area. At that time, the area had a population of 285,000, and there were 200,000 personally owned vehicles, making 740,000 trips a day. Taking everything into consideration, the resulting math and simulations led them to believe that all transportation trips in this area around Ann Archer could be achieved with only 15% of the currently used cars. Instead of 200,000 vehicles, Ann Arbor would only have 30,000 shared vehicle fleets driving around each day. This would be congestion-free living, and those cars need way fewer parking spots and mostly in fleet parking areas distributed conveniently around town.
Saving family time
No need to waste time on getting the car out of the garage or some parking lot, no filling up on gas, no checking or changing of tires, no dealing with car shops or service guys, no more getting a smog check done, no paying the DMV or insurance. Everything is taken care of. All you do is open an app and call a ride. In the simulation imagined by the Earth Institute, every car would arrive within 2-5 min and drop you off exactly where you want to be. That is still quicker than circling around and finding a parking spot at the end of the ride.
Carbon Emissions (GHG)
When you have a fleet of autonomous electric vehicles (EV-AVs), the fleet operator is incentivized to lower the cost per mile and, therefore, also the air pollution and carbon emissions. He is better off with the most economical vehicle using the cheapest form of energy (parking lot solar) and his own storage (EVs). Compare this to Detroit, which has been chiefly interested in optimizing its sales and selling into fossil-fuel addiction. Acceleration and horsepower are still bigger sales pitches for them than MPG. They aren’t interested in owners driving their cars for 300,000 miles. Looks are more important than practicality or quality. Fleet operators would put a completely different level of pressure on car manufacturers than today’s individual owners do. Private owners are way more gullible; they see the high sales price and filling up the gas tank as a sunk cost. They forget about it 5 minutes later and keep wasting their retirement savings to get $7 coffee.
Vehicle-2-Vehicle Communication (V2V)
Humans or humanoids existed for, let’s say, some 400,000 years. They never needed STOP signs, traffic lights, or pedestrian beacons to avoid running into each other. On any huge market square, you could have a huge crowd of people going in all directions, and magically, there won’t be any collisions. Through subtle messages like smiling, head nodding, and body language, people would get around each other or just stop on a dime to avoid contact. Even on horses or bicycles, human-2-human communication and FOHC (Fear of Human Contact) would prevent people from entering other human’s private space. Even if they run into each other, it is mostly embarrassing, hardly ever fatal.
We would not need controlled intersections if vehicles had such an impressive communication system. The vehicles could be equipped with swarm intelligence similar to how ants or termites move. Even within a chaotic looking school of fish, these fishes never bump into each other. Robot-taxis could move the same way, therefore doubling or tripling the capacity of all roads while increasing safety through all intersections. In the future, large cities like London, Paris, NYC, and LA will have to block their inner cities from regular car traffic and only allow self-driving, V2V-equipped robot taxis as the only car-based, personal transportation options.
Vehicle-2-Grid (V2G)
Few ride-hailing or delivery services will be using fossil fuels going forward. They will be using a form of electric propulsion system storing electricity via hydrogen or batteries. Large fleets can be very predictable in their usage. There are typical high-usage hours, and there are lots of low-usage hours, too. With a little bit of math and a solid weather forecast, a Waymo or UPS fleet could make some money on the side by storing excess solar power during the day releasing it to the grid at peak hours and then recharging during cheap nighttime power. It could be a nice side hustle to optimize excess vehicle inventory that mostly stands around for emergency high-usage times like after events, games or concerts.
All’s Well that Ends Well
We have not reached the end of achievement in the technology around self-driving vehicles. These are just a bunch of rose-colored ways of mending robot cars into the Future of Urban Transportation, and there are even more to come. The technology is not All-American either; there are plenty of other countries working on Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles, and the melting of both technologies. There are also many problems that can be recognized or predicted already. So don’t worry, there will be a view by the “Devil’s Advocate” pretty soon.
More Information
- Youtube: Waymo Ride through Phoenix
- Youtube: Waymo Ride through San Francisco
- Youtube: Riding with Zoox
- Youtube: Driverless Car in Wuhan
- AVs: The Jurassic Period
- AVs: The 20th Century
- AVs: The Race in the Desert
- AVs: The Silicon Valley Era begins
- Lawrence Burns at Google
- Book “Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car”
- Book “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car”
Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.
