The People Fear the Autonomous Future

Waymo Autonomous Test Locations

If various tech billionaires are to be believed, the future of vehicles is electric and autonomous so none of us idiot humans can continue getting behind the wheel and killing one another. The problem is though, we idiot humans aren’t exactly totally on board with that whole giving up driving thing.

In the wake of several high profile stories about people dying in cars driven by half-baked and implemented-too-early autonomous systems, public fear of autonomous vehicles has grown precipitously, up to 73% of a recent AAA survey. Demographic wise, the biggest jump was in people ages 20 to 37, going from 49% afraid to 64%, while still being the age group most inclined to ride in self-driving cars. Women in particular are scared, with 83% saying they don’t want to ride in autonomous vehicles and a whopping 70% saying they don’t even want to share the road with them. Elon Musk will blame this on negative coverage of fatal wrecks involving autonomous tech. Journalists and safety pundits will blame it on companies rushing out technology that isn’t ready for mass consumption. The truth is, they’re both right, but only the latter led to the former, and although autonomous vehicles may end up being safer than humans, they have to prove it first. As Uber suspends its autonomous testing in Arizona (costing 300 people their jobs, by the way) and others scale back plans to launch driverless cars on roadways, it looks like there’s a ways to go yet.

Source: Tim Stevens/Roadshow

And just this week they didn’t do such a great job proving it. On a drive with journalists in Jerusalem, a Ford Fusion run by LiDAR makers MobilEye, blew through a red light during a presentation of the technology, completely ignoring the signal. Fortunately, there were no collisions and everyone is okay, but it brings to mind Uber’s incident where their autonomous Volvo failed to react to a pedestrian. MobilEye claims their cameras saw the red light, but that the electromagnetic interference from the broadcasting equipment used by the TV crew in the car screwed with the signal from the traffic light transponder, and the transponder signals trumped the cameras, so the car cruised right on through. CEO Amnon Shashua said, “It was a very unique situation, we’d never anticipated something like this,” which is exactly the problem with autonomous technology. There’s no possible way to anticipate all eventualities, so these self driving cars will never be 100 percent safe. The company claims to have fixed the issue but wouldn’t go into just how.

Karen Kasler/Ohio Public Radio

Despite all of this, the morons in Ohio have stated publicly their desire to become the “wild, wild west for self driving car testing.” And in case you think I’m kidding, those were Governor John Kasich’s exact words. For those wanting some more words from the governor, he also said “Computers do not comb their hair. Computers do not text. Computers do not talk on cellphones, and this technology, which is going to be the 21st century technology, is going to save lives.” Yeah, right up until while not texting, combing hair or talking, a computer ignores a red light and t-bones someone to death. Not only is Ohio allowing self-driving cars while other states that have done so are reevaluating their programs, they’re allowing autonomous vehicles without humans in them! Though, a licensed driver does need to monitor the vehicle remotely and be able to avoid accidents in case of system failure. This, to me, smacks of a government that has no idea what it’s doing and is grasping at straws for a way to bring some sort of investment into the state. Sorry, Ohio, but this was really short-sighted, poorly planned and idiotic.

In neighboring Pennsylvania, Uber announced they would resume testing their autonomous vehicles on the streets of Pittsburgh despite the Arizona closure, which was I’m sure very fun for Pittsburgh’s Mayor William Peduto to find out about via Twitter. After the fatal crash in Tempe, Mayor Peduto suspended Uber’s right to test, pending the completion of a federal investigation and that they would discuss how to safely resume after that. The city has outlined several changes Uber must make to continue testing, including limiting speed to 25 miles per hour, which the company is apparently fine with, and they say they met with the city several weeks ago to discuss picking up where they left off. But when the one last thing on your to-do list is “call the mayor,” you may want to get that checked off before hyping yourself on social media.

Oh, and speaking of that federal investigation? There’s some news on that, with the National Transportation Safety Board stating that the self-driving Volvo Uber in Tempe recognized both the pedestrian and bicycle she was carrying and had a full six seconds to react, but instead the system did nothing, not interpreting the woman as, you know, a human. Even at 1.3 seconds before impact, the Volvo safety systems determined emergency braking was needed to avoid hitting the woman, but Uber had disabled their systems so it didn’t interfere with theirs. The NTSB study hasn’t been concluded yet though, and they haven’t settled on a probable cause, so I’m not sure why Uber thinks this meets with Pittsburgh’s Mayor’s “completed federal investigation” ultimatum.

Meanwhile in Norway, the land of my ancestors, a company called Kolumbus has decided the future of buses is now and they will begin rolling out completely autonomous EasyMile EZ10 buses, which accommodate 15 passengers and can reach a blistering 28 miles per hour. Except they won’t be completely autonomous because Norway doesn’t permit fully autonomous vehicles on the road, so each bus will also feature a safety driver. Oh and also the buses won’t be hitting that 28 mile per hour max speed because Norway will require the bus to be limited to just 7.5 miles per hour. Oh and the buses won’t be filled to the brim with 15 passengers because Norway will require the company to haul only six people at a time. But starting in June, those six riders per bus will I’m sure have a great time speaking to their driver and watching casual runners fly by them along their route.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

The Electric Future may be Cheaper & Come Later

It’s another week in 2018, meaning there’s been a new batch of news about electric vehicles since they’re pretty much regarded as the future of motoring. But how fast that future is coming is very much in question, and a new study from the Centers for Automotive Research suggests it’s not any time soon. According to the study, government emissions and fuel economy mandates are helping drive the push into future technologies, rather than consumer interest, which tracks with the amount of people leasing electric vehicles instead of buying them.

The research suggests that electrification and self-driving tech will start in densely-populated urban areas with ride sharing services and slowly proliferate to the rest of the market with EVs expected to comprise just eight percent of the vehicle market by 2030. Remember that several cities and countries are aiming to ban the sales of gasoline and diesel-powered cars by 2040, so to make up a 92% gap in adoption in the span of ten years will require some serious incentives or some revised expectations. Additionally, any sort of slowing new vehicle sales market (like we’re seeing now) or economic downturn (like what might result from the ridiculously high deep subprime vehicle loan market) would push adoption even further down the line. 

The United Kingdom’s National Grid, however, isn’t waiting around for electric cars to take off. The electric utility announced this week that they would spend between £500 million and £1 billion to upgrade the electrical grid and install 50 fast chargers throughout the country to the point that 90% of the population would live within 50 miles of a fast charger. Such chargers would fill batteries in most EVs in about 12 minutes, which will go a long way toward soothing the range anxiety of British EV owners. Current demand for such chargers may be low, but in 2017, for the first time, the Tesla Model S outsold both the BMW 7 series and the Mercedes S-Class, so demand is certainly there among the upper crust buyers.

Photo by The Washington Post

But you may not see many other cars at those chargers for some time since the Centers for Automotive Research also suggested that investment in electric vehicle technology would slow over the next few years as companies fail to see the return on their investment with slow sales. Part of the problem with investment is that production of EVs is still very expensive because of rare earth elements like cobalt, which is used in batteries. The demand for cobalt has driven a boom in small-scale cobalt production in Africa, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some mines have been found using child labor to meet production quotas. These small-scale mines, which are sometimes referred to as “artisanal mines” because nothing can just have a normal name anymore, are tough to police and companies that purchase from them are increasingly under pressure to better vet how the resources are being produced. The value of cobalt has tripled in the last 18 months, and companies looking for the lowest cost aren’t likely to commit too much effort into ensuring their suppliers are acting ethically, which is a problem. Unfortunately, the answer usually means slowing the pace of production or paying more from reputable miners.

Toyota, however, is exploring a third option, which is developing batteries that don’t rely on rare-earth elements. While they haven’t yet found a replacement for cobalt, they have developed a battery that uses less neodymium, replacing it with lanthanum and cerium, which I understand are much more abundant and cheaper despite the fact that I’ve never heard of them before. That said, the development will take a while to get itself into vehicles and Toyota is aiming for implementation sometime in the next ten years, which won’t help potential neodymium shortages in the near-term. Now to figure out that whole cobalt thing…

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

The Future of Gas

I talk an awful lot about electric cars on my podcast, and for good reason. They’re widely accepted as the future of motoring, whether they be powered exclusively by batteries, by hydrogen fuel cells or some sort of capacitor setup we’ve yet to see. And the reasons for this are myriad - EVs produce fewer carbon emissions, they have fewer moving parts so are in theory more reliable, they make less noise and better pair with autonomous systems and, critically, there is a finite amount of oil on this planet to power internal combustion cars. 

But the truth is, and I’ve spoken to this before, I love gasoline. I love pumping it into a tank for five minutes and turning a key or pressing a button and having an electric motor spit that gasoline into a chamber whose sole purpose is to contain a tiny explosion ignited by a little electric spark. And, more than anything else, I love the sound it makes. I love the fire and the fury of a singing six cylinder and the rumbling burble of a V8, even at idle. I love the angry beehive of a turbocharged four cylinder or the raucous rasp of a V-twin, or especially my inline triple. And I will miss all of those things when gasoline engines go away. 

But fortunately, I don’t think we’re in danger of that, at least not for many years. In 2017, electric vehicles made up less than a tenth of a percent of total vehicle sales in the United States, and, sure, they did better elsewhere in the world where incentives are higher or there are more models available or where the income gap is narrower and people have more funds to spend on more expensive electric vehicles, but most analysts predict it will be at least 2025 before electric vehicles are on parity with internal combustion cars in terms of costs.

With the average price of new cars rising every year and the income gap only widening, an increasing majority of the auto buying public will be priced out of electric vehicles even when their average price matches gasoline cars. Buyers will continue to buy used petrol-powered cars until the third or fourth generation of EVs are out and the initial versions have depreciated to the point where they’re affordable. Even then, you’ll have the issue of battery life/reliability and the question of whether infrastructure has built up enough for buyers to see EVs as worthy competitors to good old gas engines.

According to a new report by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the rate of car ownership in the US is increasing, from .756 vehicles per person in 2015 to .766 vehicles per person in 2016, so there’s a very real chance that, of the people who will be buying an electric car, they’ll be buying it to complement their existing gas vehicles or to serve as a commuting car.

Another report from Bank of America predicts that the U.S. will reach peak oil demand in 2030, meaning there will be no further growth in the demand for oil or gasoline. This, they say, will be directly caused by the increasing share of electric vehicles in the automotive marketplace, which is great. Why is it great if I’m trying to make an argument for gas cars? Because less demand means that we could run into oversupply situations where gas gets even cheaper for those holdouts of gasoline cars like myself and low income households who can’t afford electric vehicles. There’s obviously a risk that oil companies anticipate this and start to curb their drilling or cut supplies, but, from my knowledge of the oil and gas industry, once a well is tapped, it doesn’t make much sense to just plug it up and leave it if even people are using less of your product. You run that well dry and squeeze it for everything it was worth. Companies may not drill new wells or invest so much in shale, which would be a great thing for the environment, so either way we kind of win.

Plus, innovation continues with gasoline engines. Companies are finding new and creative ways to increase efficiency and maximize output. Take Mazda’s Skyactiv-X technology, which achieves 30% better fuel economy than its already good Skyactiv-G engines like I had in my Mazda 3 (R.I.P.). Those will debut in 2019 while the Volvos and BMWs of the world transition their lineups to all-electric and hybrid vehicles. Indeed it’s telling that the first companies committing to move to all-electrified cars are luxury automakers, because they know the cost is higher and their buyers can afford it. 

But for every Volvo XC90, there’s a Shelby Mustang and for every Honda NSX, a Dodge Demon. In fact, there have been many cars announced in the past year that rely solely on burning dinosaurs to go fast and create a great time, and there’s no reason to think that’s going to stop, especially when mixed with some hybrid and electric vehicles, auto manufacturers can meet corporate average fuel economy standards and still have room to blow on gas guzzling performance cars for the masses. Plus the low-cost cars will still be gas-powered, as will the classic cars and trailer queens and garage angels that have been sold up to this point and will be driven on weekends by old guys who share the same love for the symphony of combustion that I have. So I’ll continue to talk about electric cars and they’ll very much continue to be the future of motoring, but that doesn’t have to mean that internal combustion and gasoline will be relegated exclusively to our past.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs