Car_and_Driver_USA_July_2017

The Columnists
A Volvo lying on its side in Tempe,
Arizona, wouldn’t normally rate a
national headline. After all, Volvo
has long asserted that the best
attributes of its cars reveal themselves
only in a crash. But this was
an autonomous Volvo, part of a
small test fleet Uber operated in Pittsburgh,
San Francisco, and Arizona. The latter had
welcomed Uber with open pro-business
arms after the company and the California
DMV got into a semantics spat, since
resolved, over a $150 permit. The Cal DMV
had revoked the registrations for Uber’s
16 test vehicles, and if the
bureaucrats were motivated
by the fear of a couple tons of
undercooked technology circulating
among the driving
public, those fears seem to
have been vindicated by the
photos of the capsized Volvo.
It doesn’t matter that, by
all accounts, it wasn’t the
fault of the Volvo’s computer that a driver
turned suddenly in front of the oncoming
robo-car, giving neither it nor the human
minder aboard time to avoid the impact.
Autonomous cars will live in a world of random
surprises. Note that around 17.5 million
light-duty vehicles were sold last year,
swelling the national fleet to more than 240
million vehicles, and only the most infinitesimal
percentage of them has any autonomous
ability whatsoever. That will be true
for this year as well. And 2018, ’19, and ’20.
CTRL-ALT-DELETE: UBER’S UPENDED
VOLVO IN TEMPE LAST MARCH.
At least for the next decade or three, autonomous
cars will have to contend with the
many heteronomous cars already on
American roads, including those driven by
a very common form of idiot who hooks a
left in front of oncoming traffc.
Which is why autonomous-car development
has moved on from the
impossible task of thinking
up and programming a computer
to respond to every
conceivable driving scenario
to getting cars wired up with
sensors and on the road to
see what it’s really like out
there. As you read this, these
cars are sponging up so much
data through their unblinking eyes that it
would exhaust the memory of the MacBook
Pro that I’m writing this on in under a minute.
Road signs and signal timing and lane
striping; merges and T-junctions and fourways;
the effects of wind and rain and glare
and shadow; the driving style of tailgaters
and dawdlers and the distracted and the
disoriented; it all goes onto the hard drive.
A friend who works in so-called big data
told me recently that the digital information
generated by these test cars measures
out in petabytes per day, a petabyte being
1 million gigabytes. All that data must be
filtered and analyzed for the patterns that
we human drivers know from experience.
That’s a job for open-source programs such
as Hadoop, a platform named after a child’s
stuffed elephant, that make it easy to spread
really big processing jobs over many computers.
The people in the machinelearning
trade figure this is the best way to
teach a computer to drive; just get it out on
the road, the same as your teenager.
Our world is changing; machinery matters
less than software. Mazda R&D chief
Kiyoshi Fujiwara told me at the Detroit
auto show this year that in the age of electric
vehicles, the powertrain, that core
technology that is so important to the identity
of a car brand, will become just another
purchased component. It is the software,
the brains, that the company must own to
call itself an automaker. Along those lines,
Honda recently opened its R&D Center X
to focus on robotics, machine learning, and
artificial intelligence. It also launched a
software lab on the 27th floor of a Tokyo
skyscraper that has all the beanbag accouterments
of a Silicon Valley computing
mosh pit, the better to attract the keen
young programming minds that are now in
such high demand in virtually every other
industry. Stanford University artificialintelligence
expert and Honda consultant
Edward Feigenbaum explained to Automotive
News that Honda’s “current R&D leadership
saw the need to move beyond the
mechanical engineering of the past toward
a digital future dominated by software, not
mechanism.” Imagine Honda’s museum of
the future, where little black boxes with
blinking lights are displayed proudly next
to examples of VTEC and CVCC.
The kids in my high-school lunchroom
talked about the cars they craved, while the
few computer geeks huddled in a corner
speaking in BASIC and other foreign languages.
I haven’t been in a school lunchroom
in a while, but by all reports, the ratio
has pretty well reversed. The geeks won,
judging from all the electronic devices
about and the kids who say they want to go
into computers. We who delight in the
finely orchestrated motion of cams pressing
on valves and forests of connecting rods
cavorting in a perfect balance of lubricated
harmony increasingly look like rust-age
dinosaurs. Eventually they’ll put us in
museums, too.
Aaron Robinson
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRESCO NEWS/MARK BEACH
032 . CAR AND DRIVER . JUL/2017