Google is pulling a “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Like Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom plotting to rid Los Angeles of its trolley system to bolster the auto and oil industries, Google is “quietly lobbying” Nevada for legislation to become the first state where autonomous cars could legally be operated on the roads, The New York Times reports Wednesday.
A second bill Google pushes would exempt the erstwhile driver of an autonomous car from distracted driving laws if he or she were on the phone, texting, or Googling while behind the now-redundant steering wheel. There’s more money to be made as the technology gives commuters more time to Google, and that’s not counting revenues from Google Maps technology, plus maybe autonomous driving software the company has been developing.
Autonomous cars are the future, 2953 Analytics’ Jim Hall says on pages 18-19 of the June issue of Motor Trend. He predicts they’ll replace cab drivers in some cities by the end of this decade. Perhaps he’s being too conservative. Modern technology already is making obsolete the finely honed skill of parallel parking. The technology is ready for our society, and there’s evidence our society is ready for the technology.
“Policy analysts say Nevada is the first state to consider the commercial deployment of a generation of vehicles that may park themselves,” The Times reports, “perform automatic deliveries or even act as automated taxis on the Las Vegas casino strip.”
Central to Google’s lobbying effort is Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who led the winning entry to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) first autonomous vehicle contest, way back in 2005. Thrun has since left Stanford for Google, and says that robotic cars will increase energy efficiency while cutting road injuries.
Hall, a regular juror on Motor Trend’s Car of the Year panel, calls this “a perfect example of technology progressing beyond the control of people who care about such stuff.”
When I asked Thrun, through his public relations, for his opinion of Hall’s prediction, he demurred, saying (through the flack) “It’s just too hard to predict.”
Oh yeah? Perhaps what he meant to say was, “grab a Johnnycab on your way to the 2013 New York International Auto Show, and look for the TTGoogle in your local Audi dealer by 2018.”
Want more evidence? Last week, Hall emceed the Automotive Press Association Michelin Design Panel in Detroit, with Larry Erickson, transportation design chair for the College of Creative Studies, Joseph Dehner, chief for Ram and Dodge Design at Chrysler Group, Joel Piaskowski, Ford’s design director, and Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird, GM’s director of advanced technology vehicle concepts.
Theme of the APA Michelin discussion was, “City, 2046: Art, Life and Ingenuity.” Not one of the four experts challenged Hall’s assertion that most cars in large, metro areas will be robot-driven 35 years from now.
“We’re seeing a definite trend where a lot of young people aren’t even interested in cars, anymore,” Piaskowski said. “If it’s more of an appliance to go from Point A to Point B, it’s a mobility device, if you will … their mobility devices are basically in their hands, at their fingertips, right now.”
Bingo. Piaskowski knows there are still plenty of young enthusiasts, as well as enthusiasts waiting to be born, but they’re not as big a part of the current and emerging market as we were in our day. Computer enthusiasts were rare when I was in college, and Internet enthusiasts lived only at places like DARPA back then. You don’t need to wait until you’re 16 to legally fulfill your computer gaming jones.
This is where high-speed trains come in. Google’s two bills in the Nevada legislature are for the vast majority of American drivers who have never seen a turbodiesel-powered station wagon with a stick shift, let alone would consider buying or learning to drive one.
Consumers’ shift away from cars as a lust object seems almost inevitable, when you consider how popular the utilitarian, not-fun-to-drive SUVs and crossovers have been for two decades now. Hall believes the last owner-driven cars will be sportscars, because when the car replaced the horse, the horse went from being a utilitarian animal to a sporting one.
If we’re not going to be driving for ourselves, why not have high-speed rail between large American cities, instead? Why not light rail inside the cities? Why not offer non-drivers the alternative that’s already here, and will save far more oil than autonomous cars?
Because it’s too costly, the opposition says. Commuter rail would never make it without federal subsidies, or outright government ownership, which is what we have already.
For such philosophical reasons, Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, turned down $2 billion in Obama administration high-speed rail subsidies. Earlier this week, Michigan, which also has a Republican governor named Rick, grabbed the funds to improve the Detroit-to-Chicago run to 110-mph high speed rail. That route now runs as slow as 40 mph in some areas.
Governor Snyder hasn’t turned down the reallocation of funds in part because high gas prices have helped boost Detroit-to-Chicago ridership by 16 percent this year. When intercity rail is upgraded to include wireless Internet, you can go online and Google to your heart’s content, and you don’t need to shut down your laptop as you approach your destination. My dream scenario would be 150+ mph high-speed rail, with GM perhaps re-entering the locomotive business, Ford and Chrysler also becoming involved in design and manufacture and maybe contracting out ticketing and staffing services to U.S. airlines.
Getting on and off a train is far easier, for now, than going through airports, and a 110-mph train from Detroit to Chicago would take about four hours, the amount of time you can expect to spend getting in and out of two airports, plus airtime for the same route. I’d be happy to take high-speed rail to the New York International Auto Show, instead of a flight to LaGuardia or JFK or Newark. Plenty of time to get work done, plus a bar car. What’s wrong with that?
Most auto journalists of all stripes, left wing to right wing, like high-speed rail because we’ve ridden 150+ mph trains in Europe and Japan. They’re far more relaxing than airline flights. It should be noted that those systems are highly subsidized, but then again, the same goes for just about every form of transportation.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats are just now arguing over whether to end lucrative oil drilling tax incentives.
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced a program to subsidize up to $5.8 billion to its automakers to help them develop electric cars. Meanwhile, GM, Toyota and Honda have reported slowing Chinese sales as that country reinstated a 10 percent tax rate on small cars and phased out trade-in incentives for rural areas. The world’s governments and all kinds of transportation, from trains to planes to automobiles, have been joined at the hip since the Industrial Revolution.
So how would high-speed rail save the owner-operated motorcar? Very probably the next several decades will weed out smaller, weaker automakers globally, whether we’re riding in anodyne personal transportation pods or on crowded trains. In the U.S., we’re trying to claw our way back to 15-million unit annual sales, the number we first reached in 1965 with a much smaller population and lower levels of immigration.
Improved rail won’t automatically replace the automobile. Big European cities still have traffic jams, after all. But a system allowing your average cell phone jockey to give up his or her car and get from home to work with a minimum of walking would leave the roads to a larger portion of drivers who actually like to drive. We’ll probably see car prices go up, though that seems inevitable, anyway.
I’m hoping that by 2046, the driver’s movement will have evolved, just like the bicycle movement of recent years. That movement has morphed from bike geeks on $3,000+ American-made models to commuters demanding more dedicated lanes in Brooklyn. Start thinking about our favorite mode as part of a transportation system, and we may find a way out of the parking lots we call our daily commute.
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