Realities of driverless cars
A former school mate and college mate of mine, who is now national director for World Vision, Kenya, was recently on a trip to Seattle, USA. One morning, as a colleague of his drove him along the highway towards the headquarters of Microsoft, he noticed a vehicle that overtook them but had no driver. The lone passenger in that vehicle was sitting on the back seat and was busy reading a magazine.
This is no fairly tale. This was one of the vehicles developed by the software giant, Google, to be automatically driven. All you need to do is programme your destination into a gadget and the computer will take care of everything else.
It is amazing what innovation can do. In South Africa these days, taxi drivers are equipped with global positioning system (GPS) gadgets. You tell them (the drivers, that is) a destination, and they punch it in. The gadget will, by means of pre-programmed speech, direct them to that destination. All the driver has to do is listen to the directions played out through the car’s audio system.
“Take the right turn 100 metres from here.”
“Take the next left turn.”
Eventually, the gadget will announce, “You are now at your destination”.
What Google has done is to take this experience a step further by eliminating the human intervention. The vehicle will steer itself and take all the necessary turns. What is more, all around the vehicle are mounted laser and radar sensors that will help the vehicle “know” whether there are obstacles in its vicinity. And if there are, the necessary response will be triggered to slow down the vehicle or stop it, or veer it away from the obstacle. All this is done without human intervention.
The technology is still in the process of being fine-tuned so that the vehicles can automatically handle tricky situations. One such situation is when a police officer stops the car. How will the car know it must stop because there is a police officer ahead? Another is how to quickly make a decision regarding objects on the road which do not need to cause a vehicle to veer off, for example, a discarded plastic bag. A human driver, on realising that the object is a flexible one, will decide to driver over it. A driverless car will slow down and go round it. If a road is littered with such objects, a car in driverless mode will be utterly confused.
Apart from Google, a parts manufacturing company called Delphi is also developing driverless cars. The two have been licensed to test their vehicles in the state of California on the strict condition that they must report all accidents their vehicles get involved in. At the time of writing this article, Google had reported 11 accidents over 2.7 million kilometres covered by their test vehicles. They were quick to say that these accidents were minor, caused no injuries and that none of them had been caused by their vehicles.
Agreed, we still have some way to go before self-driven cars become absolutely safe consumer goods they are touted to eventually be. But important strides have been made, and there is no going back, in my view.
What we need to do locally is search within ourselves and see if we are geared up for this kind of innovation. We need to put our house in order. If we do not, we will be overtaken by such innovations.
For a start, we need to upgrade our address system for these kinds of cars to operate on our roads. Without street addresses, these vehicles will not have a clue where you want them to go. Even the GPS-equipped taxis of South Africa cannot operate in Malawi, or will, at best, be very limited in their operation because only few places have street addresses.
