Pub. 1 2018-2019 |Issue 2

7 and the road infrastructure. Fully autonomous cars will still have steer- ing wheels, but at some point car manufacturers will probably remove all manual controls. Drivers are starting to become more comfortable with the idea of automat- ed cars, although they are still bothered when there is an accident caused by an automated car. A study that was conducted for AAA and released in January 2018 found that 63 percent of those drivers who were surveyed felt afraid of riding in a fully automated car. That’s a high percentage, cer- tainly … but one year earlier, a similar survey found that 78 percent of those surveyed felt afraid. A 15 percent drop in one short year is significant. There are still setbacks, of course. An Uber self-driving car in Arizona hit and killed a pedestrian in March. Also in March, a Tesla Model X in California that was using autopilot crashed and the driver was killed. Both accidents received heavy coverage in the media. Government officials in Arizona told Uber to stop using self-driving cars on state roads. Uber itself stopped its test program for the cars. When AAA conducted a new poll after these two accidents, the number of those surveyed who felt afraid of automated cars had gone up again, this time to 73 percent. That’s a 10 percent gain, but people still weren’t as fearful as they had been in Janu- ary 2017. These accidents slow down the process of building autonomous vehicles. They don’t stop it. Another U.S. survey conducted in April 2018 of 1,873 people found that they did not see themselves buying a self- driving car in the next five years, and 79 percent said they were not excited by the idea of self-driving cars, either. Don’t put too much weight on that. Sometimes people have to use some- thing in order to see the value it offers. When GPS navigation systems were first introduced more than 20 years ago, for example, people were gener- ally not interested until they began to see howmuch easier it was to use one than to rely on a paper map. Now, however, most people rely on their smartphone apps whenever they want to drive anywhere unfamiliar, and those old paper maps got taken out of their cars a long time ago. What is clear is that people like having a little help with driving. People might not be ready for cars that drive them- selves completely, but they are ready for technology that has automatic braking, allows them to use adaptive cruise control, keeps drivers in their lanes, alerts themwhen something is in a blind spot, and gives them a camera image (complete with green, yellow, and red guidelines) to help them back up safely. Perceptions about driving are going to change as people become more comfortable with the idea of get- ting help from their cars. Engineers are doing what they can to speed the process along. The Soci- ety of Automotive Engineers held a Tampa, Florida demo day in May 2018 to demonstrate autonomous vehicles. The demonstration included driving at 55 mph on an isolated stretch of free- way. After 250 participants rode in an autonomous vehicle built by Perrone Robotics, they took a survey. Of the 250 people, 85 percent, or approximately 212 of them, said they would let their children ride in a fully automated car. One of the participants was a man in his 90s; he was completely comfortable with the experience. Two large areas that will need to be thoroughly discussed before autonomous vehicles can take to the roads in significant numbers are issues involving insurance and driver’s licenses. If someone is in an autonomous vehicle, is not driving and there is a crash, where does the liability belong? There are at least two options for that: including compulsory insurance for everyone, or having automobile manufacturers who choose to self-insure. (Volvo’s management has already opted for the second option.) Driver’s licenses are an issue because it might be necessary to make sure that https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gW6Wt2WQotY drivers are qualified to take control of a car if for some reason that becomes necessary, but if people are not used to driving, taking over is more difficult, more difficult than it would be if people drive cars every day. Another issue involves recording what happens during drives in an event data recorder so that if there is an accident, the people who figure out what happened will have some- thing to work with. Many questions will have to be re- solved before autonomous vehicles become commonplace on roads throughout the world. Make no mistake, however, the day is com- ing when those questions will have been asked and answered, and cars will become increasingly responsible for safety on our roads. If autono- mous driving prevents human error while driving, and brings down the number of annual fatalities to some- thing much lower than it is today, then that will be a good thing. This is especially true if those peo- ple whose lives are saved are our teenage and young adult children or our parents. Autonomous cars represent an exciting opportunity for dealer- ships. Personal use accounts for 75 percent of the automobile market- place, leaving 25 percent for shared use. The fact that companies like Waymo, which has a business model based on self-driving technology, has partnered with AutoNation, the largest car dealer in the U.S., tells you where the industry is headed. For more information, see a video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gW6Wt2WQotY 3