London is set for driverless car roll-out – so what comes next?

THE French Riviera is lovely at this time of year. I’m zipping along the coast in an old Honda Civic. The steering wheel spins to take the car round a bend – but my hands stay in my lap. And since there’s no need to keep my eyes on the road, I’m free to enjoy the beachfront view. An oddly pixelated man with a two-dimensional windsurfer under his arm gives me the eye.

Sadly, my Riviera is being projected on a large wrap-around screen in a room-sized simulator in Wokingham, UK. As the car navigates the windy road, Nick Reed at the Transport Research Lab sits next to me and talks about the plan to deploy driverless cars in Greenwich, London, by the end of the year.

The Gateway project will see London become one of the first cities in the world to have driverless vehicles. The number and exact routes they will take have still to be decided, but a few months from now you will be able to jump into an autonomous pod (see picture, above) and be ferried to your destination along public roads. “It’ll be the first chance the public has had to experience driverless cars,” says Reed. “Not just the people on board, but the people sharing the space with them.”

This is the beginning of a revolution in transport, as the cars roll out slowly in small pilots in urban areas. In the UK, Greenwich, Milton Keynes, Coventry and Bristol will lead the way. Similar projects are happening in other cities around the world, including Singapore; Austin, Texas; Mountain View in California; and Ann Arbor in Michigan.

“Guardian angels will never fully take control but will instead jump in to stop you doing something stupid“

One of the things driverless cars need is highly detailed maps, and these are being developed for each of the pilot cities. The islands of precision mapping will then fan outwards from urban hubs along primary roads. Mapping firm TomTom says it has already covered 28,000 kilometres of roads in Germany with sufficient resolution for driverless cars – 4 per cent of all the roads in the country.

“Things like the Gateway project – where we’re going to have fully driverless cars, but operating only in certain environments – can happen quite quickly,” says Reed, as we drive over the cobbles of a small French town. “The environments in which the vehicles work will gradually become broader and more complex.”

Reed’s vision involves just one of two very different kinds of autonomous car that will hit our roads in the next year or so. The Toyota Research Institute, led by Gill Pratt, calls these two types “guardian angel” and “chauffeur”.

The autonomous passenger-ferrying pods we will see in cities are chauffeurs. Guardian angels, on the other hand, are cars that will never fully wrest control from a human but will jump in to stop you doing something stupid.

Sensors and software

Every car in Toyota’s 2017 fleet – from the most basic model up – will have the sensors and software required to run in guardian angel mode. Sensors will enable automatic emergency braking, for example, allowing the car to stop itself if it detects an imminent collision. Even the cheapest Corolla will not smash into the car in front, says Pratt.

Data from the sensors in all of its cars will be fed into Toyota’s central data centre in Plano, Texas. Toyota’s artificial intelligence researchers will then use this to train their AIs how to drive on a wider variety of roads than are being considered in pilot schemes like the Gateway project. Ultimately, data gathered from guardian angel systems will help build cars that can drive as chauffeurs on any road. “Our cars drive a trillion miles a year, which is a lot of data,” says Pratt.

Both types of self-driving car should save lives. In the UK alone, 1700 people are killed every year on the roads. Globally, the number is 1.25 million. “That’s seen as acceptable and we’ve kind of tailored our lives around that being OK,” says Reed. “But I don’t think it is OK.”

Driverless cars could also have large social benefits, helping less mobile people get around. “It’s one of the reasons that Greenwich as a local authority is so keen to look at ways it can meet the needs of a growing population and an ageing population,” says Reed.

In places like Greenwich, the demographic poised to increase the most over the next 20 years involves people over 65. One problem governments want to address is how older people can be cared for at home for longer. Using autonomous vehicles to drive them around could be a big help. “It would be a kind of super dial-a-ride, basically,” says Reed.

In general, however, consumer expectations will dictate the way we use driverless cars, says Reed (see “Interior design“). “If people in cars want to work or relax or watch films, then engineers can find ways to make the cars safe enough.”

If the pods in Greenwich are anything to go by, the size and shape of vehicles may change too. Yet the width of roads and aerodynamics will still constrain what is possible. “You can imagine completely different forms, but you probably can’t have a car 4 metres wide and 1 metre long,” says Dominique Taffin at Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, Cologne, Germany.

“Cars are rather unique things,” says Pratt. “They’re an isolation chamber that you sit in for 1 or 2 hours a day.” That’s a very odd thing to do, he says. When we no longer need to drive them ourselves, we are free to reimagine completely what we want to do with that time and space. “How can you turn driving from a dreadful experience to a wonderful experience that you would look forward to?”

Interior design

Cars that are essentially chauffeurs (see main story) are the vision of self-driving cars we are most familiar with from sci-fi films. They are also the vehicles that will change our relationship with cars the most. These vehicles don’t need a steering wheel. They find their own way. Passengers can even ignore the outside world if they choose.

“If you look at what a full autonomous experience would be, it offers many more possibilities of what a car’s interior can be,” says Dominique Taffin at Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, one the world’s leading suppliers of car interiors, such as the panelling and instruments that adorn the inside of a vehicle.

“You would have a radically different approach to how people behave in a vehicle. The size and shape can be different, seating could be different,” he says. It is not yet clear whether people would prefer to sit or stand, for example.

“You could compare it to a hotel or a house where the interior design is going to be tailored to what people want from their experience – leisure, professional or tourist,” he says.

Safety will be ultimately constrain the interiors of cars. If autonomous software can be made so trustworthy that seat belts and airbags are no longer needed, the possibilities open up even further. “Sofas, beds, whatever,” says Taffin. But time will tell. “We will discover how our behaviour changes when we have autonomous vehicles on the road.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “I am your guardian angel”

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