EuroWire January 2015

Transatlantic cable

Today’s motorists make split-second decisions on the basis of instinct and a limited view of a dangerous situation. Cars that do most or all of the driving will improve on that, but accidents will still happen. Patrick Lin, a professor who directs the ethics and emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo), told Mr Pritchard that companies testing driverless cars are not focusing on accidents. Those companies are, in Dr Lin’s view, shirking their duty to the public. He told Phys.org he had discussed the ethics of driverless cars with Google and automakers including Tesla, Nissan and BMW. But, as far as he knows, only BMW has formed an in-house group to study the issue of how a driverless car should perform when things go badly wrong. Dr Lin o ered an example of the complexity of the issue, which can only intensify with the advance of technology. Consider a driverless vehicle with in-car sensors so acute they can distinguish between a motorcyclist wearing a helmet and a companion riding without one. If a collision is inevitable, should the car hit the person with the helmet and a lower risk of injury? That would penalise prudence. Phys.org’s Mr Pritchard noted that the company most aggressively developing self-driving cars is not a carmaker at all but the Internet services giant Google, which has invested heavily in the technology it plans to introduce by 2017. Google drivers, Mr Pritchard wrote, have covered “hundreds of thousands of miles on roads and highways in tricked-out Priuses and Lexus SUVs.” But Google is focused on programming the cars to drive defensively to avoid the instances when an accident is unavoidable. “People are philosophising about [the ethics element],” said Ron Medford, the director of safety for Google’s self-driving car project. “But . . . we really haven’t studied that issue.” † One of the philosophers who is studying that issue is Cal Poly’s Patrick Lin, who believes that decisions related to programming “a machine that can foreseeably lead to someone’s death” are among the most profoundly serious that can be made. Said Dr Lin: “We expect those to be as right as we can be.” Like-minded people can be found at BMW’s group technology o ce, a neighbour of Google’s in Silicon Valley. Uwe Higgen, who heads up the unit, told Mr Pritchard that the German automaker has brought together specialists in technology, ethics, social impact, and the law to discuss a range of issues raised by cars that take over the driving chores from humans. † To some, the fundamental moral area here is not the rare catastrophic accident: it is the obligation to weigh appropriate scepticism of driverless-car technology against its potential to save lives. After all, Mr Pritchard reminded his readers, more than 30,000 people die in tra c accidents each year in the United States. “No one has a good answer for how safe is safe enough,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor who has written extensively on self-driving cars, told Phys.org . “[Self- driving cars] are going to crash, and that is something that the companies need to accept and the public needs to accept.”

“I think the industry is a little bit jittery,” Ms Stephens told the Detroit Free Press . “They saw what happened to GM in 2014 and Toyota not too long ago.” As a result, she said, automakers are probably erring on the side of being more cautious than before.

Slow to warm to electric and hybrid vehicles, Americans are eager for cars that drive themselves – if only part-time

Some 55 per cent of American car buyers are very likely to buy a partially autonomous vehicle: one that drives itself on the highway or in tra c jams. 44 per cent would buy a fully autonomous vehicle that does all the driving – and more than 20 per cent of those would pay an extra $4,000 for the feature. These statistics, derived from a canvass of prospective buyers, were provided by a speaker at the Society of Automotive Analysts and Citi Research Automotive Investor Summit, held 9 th October in South eld, Michigan. What they mean, said Xavier Mosquet of Boston Consulting Group, is that if regulations do not push the industry toward self-driving cars, customer demand will. Electric and hybrid vehicles were seen continuing their steady but unspectacular advance. Itay Michaeli of Citi Research told the Detroit-area meeting that EV/hybrids will rise from 3.6 per cent of US vehicle sales in 2015 to nine per cent in 2020. And, provided there is a major reduction in battery cost, Nissan North America product planning director Ken Kcomt said he expects global market share of all-electric cars to triple by 2025. As reported by Detroit Free Press auto critic Mark Phelan, speakers also said they expected electricity and weight reduction techniques to increase as automakers and suppliers gear up to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. (”Analysts Praise Autonomous Vehicles, Fuel Saving Techs,” 10 th October) † A dramatic shift to nine and ten-speed automatic transmissions over the next decade. (Borg Warner director of investor relations Ken Lamb) † Signi cant growth in the use of continuously variable auto- matic transmissions as other automakers adopt the component adopted by Nissan 20 years ago. (Nissan’s Mr Kcomt) † Commercial use of 3D printing to make some vehicles and parts. (Ravindra Kondagunta, CEO of TractionLabs) † Only limited use of carbon bre in volume vehicles until its price falls to $5-$8 from the $10 a pound it commands today. (Ford Motor Co manager of global materials and manufacturing research Matt Zaluzec) A new ethicist The car of the future will have near-perfect perception and react from programmed logic. How will it decide who should be saved? Justin Pritchard, of the Internet-based technology news service Phys.org , acknowledges the relative ease of writing computer code that directs a self-driving car how to respond to an emergency. The hard part, he said, is deciding what the response should be. (“Self-Driving Cars: Safer – but What of Their Morals?” 19 th November) Other major developments projected from the platform include:

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January 2015