People have a lot of different visions
of what the future is going to be with
autonomous vehicles.
And it kind of divides into two worlds.
One group has a very utopian view--
AV's will deliver all of these social
and environmental benefits.
but there's also a dystopian view.
I'm David Malakoff
I'm a deputy news editor here at Science
and I edited our autonomous vehicles package.
Our two reporters who looked at the phenomenon
of autonomous vehicles realized that
there are a lot of obstacles in the way
to the full deployment of fully
autonomous vehicles.
So it turns out when you survey people
they actually have a lot of apprehension
about getting into an AV and so there's
actually a lot of research now going on
looking at: How do people perceive AVs?
Not just the people who are inside them
but also the people who are outside them, around them.
So for example, when an AV pulls up to a crosswalk,
how will a pedestrian know that the car
has seen them right?
And recognize them.
How will the car communicate with the pedestrian
what it's about to do.
But also inside the car—-
so for example, researchers are experimenting
with things like cars that talk to the passenger.
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In order to reassure them and tell them
what the car is about to do.
Or video screens that show the
passenger what the car is seeing
all the landmarks, the pedestrians, the other cars.
So one of the interesting debates among
people who study autonomous vehicles is
how safe do the cars actually have to get
before consumers will be persuaded
to use them and that they're worth
putting out on the road
in terms of saving lives.
So on one side are people who say,
boy, you know consumers are never gonna really trust
these cars until they are perfectly safe.
Which is a little odd right, because right now we accept
a pretty high level of risk when we
get into our cars right?
People are unwilling
to get into an AV that might be just as
safe as current cars that are on the road because
you know they have a sense that they don't have control.
There's another group of scholars who
have a slightly different view.
They say look we should get some minimum
increment in the increase in safety say
3% or 5% or 10% and just start putting
those cars on the road.
Get them learning how to become better
and then over time you'll get safer and safer cars.
So ownership is an interesting question.
A lot of companies that are building AVs
are imagining a future where they are
selling to fleets.
So imagine Uber or Lyft or taxicab companies
where the entire fleet are automated vehicles.
In the dystopian view, there's also an equity concern
which is that some people will have access
to this technology and other people won’t.
So for example, people living in cities
which have well-built infrastructure
might have easy access to AVs but
people who live in rural areas where the infrastructure
is not so good might not have such easy access.
One of the big unknowns is:
How are people gonna actually use these cars?
It turns out there's surprisingly little research
on this but there are some studies going on.
One was quite clever.
To mimic behavior of using an AV, a researcher agreed
to give a number of families in California
access to a chauffeur-driven car for a week.
That would show up whenever they wanted
and do whatever they wanted it to do.
And then she compared the use of the
chauffeur-driven car to how they drove the week before
they had the chauffeur-driven car and the week after
they had the chauffeur-driven car.
What she found was they actually took many more trips,
traveled many more miles.
So that feeds into this idea that AVs
may not necessarily reduce car use—-
they could increase car use.
I think the bottom line of our two stories is that
amidst all this hype surrounding autonomous vehicles
people need to step back, take a deep breath
and realize things may not happen quite as quickly
as they seem and that they should really
be a little skeptical about all of the claims
that are being made about AVs.
Maybe the hype has outrun the reality
and eventually there's going to be a balancing out.
