We have seen this in science fiction films, autonomous cars may soon become a reality. However, the rule of law, in this case, traffic rules, are non-existent on Indian roads. Does this mean we might miss out on the future or will we be condemned for being a developing countryIJ
A few weeks ago, this writer was invited by the Ford Motor Company to attend its ‘Further With Ford’ conference at their world headquarters in Dearborn, outside Detroitl; the fabled ‘motor city’ of the US. It was quite a learning experience even for someone who has been covering the automotive space for over a decade and a half now. There was an opportunity to drive some of Ford’s latest vehicles featuring some fantastic technology, including the latest iteration of their best-selling F-150 ‘truck’ with a 10-forward speed automatic transmission, as well as their new Focus RS Hatchback which defines the term ‘pocket rocket’.
But the highlight of the trip was undoubtedly taking a ride in Ford’s autonomous vehicle prototype. While a Ford engineer and a technician sat in the front seat, constantly monitoring the car and the array of instruments on the roof, sitting diagonally behind the ‘drivers’ seat, one could clearly observe that no steering wheel or pedal inputs were given. For those 15-odd minutes around Dearborn, the car actually drove itself.
While the car remained more or less inside the Ford campus, these were public roads. Impressively, at a junction when the car had to turn left (in the US, they drive on the right-hand side of the road as opposed to India), there was no turn signal, as not all traffic signals have a specific light for a left turn. A driver would have to account for oncoming traffic and wait for a gap in the traffic before making the turn. That is exactly what the electronic brain inside this car did.
Yes, the computer running this robot — make no mistake this was a robot — was a highly conservative one. It never came close to breaking the 30-mile per hour speed limit and waited even for the most confused of pedestrians. It must be remembered that all this achievement has come in barely a decade. This may not be the Jetson’s style of flying cars, but when the United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gave the go-ahead for the development of autonomous vehicles in 2004, they were essentially university research projects that ran in the desert and had massive arrays on their roofs.
The DARPA’s goal in 2004, which the US Congress had mandated, was to develop autonomous vehicles so that fewer US soldiers get put under the line of fire. These were not only ground vehicles, but also planes, and the US lead in drones such as the Predator and Global Hawk as well as the new Northrop-Grumman X-47B which can operate from a US supercarrier, is remarkable. There is speculation that the US military is very close to deploy fully-autonomous tanks. Tests are also being carried out on an autonomous version of the US M1A2 Abrams tank.
Yet, a war-zone and public roads are quite different, and in fact, given the success of the car and the fact that humans drive cars in all sorts of conditions, the number of variables on the public roads are actually far greater than that on a battlefield. Speaking to James McBride, the head of Ford’s Autonomous Vehicle project, who has worked with DARPA in the past, you get a sense of how far Ford and the several other auto manufacturers such as Sweden’s Volvo and tech companies such as Google and Uber have come. Some of the technology onboard Ford’s autonomous cars seems like from the future, the laser Ranging system (liDAR), for example, provides a 75-meter ‘bubble’ around the car in real-time and this can sense any changes to the environment.
Technology is advancing so rapidly and dropping costs so fast that the 32 lasers mounted on the car now will soon increase to an array of 108 lasers proving a 150 meter ‘bubble’. The cameras on the car can read road signs and engineers are working on the car to be able to monitor traffic information to adjust routes if changes have to be made.
Though Ford’s top engineer, Raj Nair, who has also been working on this project for years, had a telling statement to make. “It is only when you try to replicate our abilities that we realise how much for granted we take ourselves. There are not better optical sensors than these (pointing to eyes), no better auditory sensors than these (pointing to his ears) and no better algorithmic processor than this (pointing to his head).”
Google has been running tests on their self-driving vehicles for several years now in California, and Uber just started trials with self-driving cars in Pittsburg, although Uber was beaten to the punch by Singapore based NuTonomy, which is running a trial with self-driving taxis in a district of the South-East Asian financial hub and plans to have a fleet operating by 2018.
McBride admits that Ford is nowhere close to that, but Ford Motor Company Chief Executive Mark Fields announced the transformation of the company that invented the moving production line and mass production from a car company to a mobility company and said that Ford would have an autonomous car in mass production by 2021.
There is a clear reason for the shift towards autonomous cars, urban conglomerations are getting very crowded and are effectively choking as a result of their own success. The success of firms like Uber and Ola in India are proving that even here, people are opting for shared services like taxis rather than indulge in the stress of the daily commute. Coupled with effective mass transportation systems, cities will have to look at new mobility solutions. The single largest cost in a taxi, at least in the West, is the cost of a driver.
But herein lies the rub, Ford Chairman, Bill Ford mentioned that a survey conducted by the company had 84 per cent of respondents in India saying that they would want an autonomous car. That is a great number, but Carlos Ghosn, the Chairman of the Renault-Nissan alliance, mentioned at the Paris Motor Show recently that autonomous vehicles would only work in countries where there was road discipline.
Even if Ghosn did not take India by name, it does not take a genius to figure out that India would be at the top of the list of countries where ‘road discipline’ is an amorphous concept. The autonomous cars in development can work in the US, Germany, Sweden and Singapore because people follow traffic rules. With the country with the highest amount of road deaths annually, it is imperative that we improve our road discipline to be able to bring down that horrific number. It is also needed if India wants to be part of the future, because make no mistake self-driving cars are a reality today and they will be widespread soon with resultant shifts in manufacturing. Can India afford to lose out on the future or will it always be condemned for being a developing countryIJ
(The writer is Managing Editor, The Pioneer)