Our series on the Future of Transportation explores innovations and challenges that affect how we move around the world.
Imagine driving on I-95 when you see red brake lights for a long time. Imagine not touching the brakes or steering wheel and sitting back and letting the car handle it.
For the next hour of stop-and-go, the truck’s system does the driving. The pickup goes to a 70 mile-per-hour speed when traffic is lighter. The system looks for blind spots.
This truck isn’t designed to be completely self-sufficient. The truck has a camera that watches the driver. If you look away for more than a few seconds, there is a blue light on the steering wheel rim that you can see. The rim will flash red if you ignore the prompt.
With a federal investigation and lawsuits over fatal accidents involving its autopilot system, could a scaled-down approach like the one described be more realistic for hands-free driving?
This type of system, more like a chaperone than one you would find in a fully robotic car, is a necessary component for top scores from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. GeneralMotors is taking the lead with their Super Cruise system, but they are not the only ones.
Super Cruise combines minutely detailed, 3-D laser-scanned roadway maps with cameras, radar and onboardGPS The company plans to double the system’s operational domain to 400,000 miles by the end of the year. The Pacific Coast Highway, Route 66 and the Trans-Canada Highway are some of the most famous byways in North America.
This doesn’t mean that car companies are abandoning the idea of self-driving cars. In addition to the Cruise division of G.M., there are other companies developing and testing robotaxis with human safety operators on board. Cruise has begun charging fares for rides in modified Chevy Bolt EV’s in San Francisco and is hoping to start a program in the Middle East.
As fully driverless technology has failed, so has faith in it. Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor in the School of Law and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, has advised the federal government on self-driving cars. Most of the driving people do not have a full sense of the winning combination.
Following a two-car collision that injured two people in June, Cruise temporarily halted and recalled all of its 80 cars. According to a G.M. public filing, law enforcement had cited the human-driven car for being mostly at fault, including for speeding, and that the company’s robotaxis had, before the collision, safely executed nearly 125,000 left-hand turns.
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The president of I.I.H.S. said that the industry’s reality check over the technical challenges is masking genuine progress. The building blocks of partial autonomy cars are already in the showrooms. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and I.I.H.S. forged a voluntary agreement in 2016 to make automated emergency braking standard on every new car.
According to Mr. Harkey, radar-linked brakes have cut police-reported rear-end crashes by 50 percent. Anti-lock brakes, cameras, radar and Ultrasonic sensors, blind spot and lane departure monitors, and adaptive cruise control are all standard.
The same will be true for some new tech. Mr. Harkey said that they would push to get more features on more models.
He said the trick was to build on that promise, with systems that boost safety but keep humans in the loop.
Driver assistance systems are not replacement systems. Some consumers don’t know what they’re talking about.
The I.I.H.S. is testing a type of car called partial-autonomous. The firstSafeguard Ratings will be released this fall to help guide consumers and spur the industry to integrate the most effective features.
A good rating requires a driver monitoring system that looks at both the driver’s gaze and hand position. A driver with a coffee in one hand and an iPad in the other won’t be able to drive again. A fail-safe procedure to safely slow or halt the vehicle if the system is used or to aid an injured driver are included in other criteria. Many of those features are integrated by Super Cruise. The I.I.H.S. wants systems to have drivers initiate lane changes to keep them involved in the process.
There are potential barriers for driver-assisted tech to achieve a good rating. The shortage of chips has made it difficult for the I.I.H.S. to gather and test new cars. In a 2020 survey, the I.I.H.S. found that Super Cruise and similar systems led subjects to drive faster, look away more often and use more hand-held devices.
In Germany, Mercedes has begun pushing boundaries with its new Drive Pilot, which allows a driver to check email, watch a movie, and even take a break, but still be monitored and warned when to return to driving. I.I.H.S. divides these types of systems into levels of automation. The diciest of the levels is Level 3, with a driver at the ready, compared with Level 5 cars that are robotic. Drive Pilot can only drive on certain highways at high speeds. The system is going to be offered in the US next year.
G.M. and other companies are taking a different approach to marketing.
Mario Maiorana is the chief engineer at Super Cruise.
G.M. engineers say that safe and responsible deployment has guided every decision, even as the company faced mounting criticism for not keeping pace withTesla’s autopilot.
G.M. plans to debut its Ultra Cruise on the Cadillac Celestiq, a six-figure electric flagship sedan. The system is designed to deliver hands-free driving on more than three million miles of roadway in the US and Canada.
Ultra Cruise’s chief engineer said the systems need to work with full transparency and consistency to instill confidence.
It’s hard to get someone to let go of the steering wheel on highways.
According to G.M., Ultra Cruise will stop and start at traffic lights and stop signs, autonomously follow navigation routes, do close-object avoidance of vehicles and pedestrians, and even self-parking in driveway. G.M. can shut down the system on any road where the company is not confident of performance. According to G.M., the system will eventually handle 95 percent of driving.
According to Prof. Smith, excessive focus on drawbacks of driver-assistance systems distorts the true crisis, as nearly 43,000 Americans died in motor-vehicle crashes last year.
He said that at least 100 people will die on US roads today. Not one will be killed in connection with a driver assistance system.