The Dull Realities of Self-Driving Cars

The future of mobility in the age of autonomous vehicles generated a lot of SXSW buzz. Allstate hosted a panel on the subject and I got the opportunity to represent Arity at a roundtable on the subject.

It’s fun to daydream about the ways in which autonomous vehicles will change the world. Parking lots will be turned into parks! Vehicle ownership will be a thing of the past and all resources will be fully utilized! We'll eliminate traffic and reduce greenhouse gasses by a tremendous amount! Road fatalities will plummet! And we haven’t even started talking about flying cars!

Daydreaming is easy. But the conversations that gave me the most value were the ones with a big dose of reality.

What do we do about the ethics of programming autonomous vehicles? A car will occasionally have a choice when there’s an unavoidable accident: it can swerve and kill the driver or it can save the driver but kill pedestrians. As Bill Ford, chairman of Ford Motor Company mentioned, humans are too slow to make that kind of decision. And as a car manufacturer, he can’t make that decision on behalf of society. If a 3rd party vehicle ethics panel comes up with a standard, I would expect him to follow suit.

Another dose of reality is making sure that autonomous vehicles don’t increase traffic instead of decrease. There's little doubt that self-driving cars will bring the cost of car ownership down in the long term. The decrease in price may cause a sharp increase in demand, and already-gridlocked cities will be brought to a standstill. The solution for this lies in autonomous mass transit and inclusive mobility solutions. Subways and busses have great value for moving people along popular routes; let’s leave the self-driving cars for last-mile delivery.

Speaking of city planning, what about infrastructure? Fancy cars and terrible roads won’t help us get anywhere faster. And are we doing enough to plan for suburban and rural autonomous vehicles? Design solutions for less-dense communities require a whole different solution.

The list of "boring" topics related to autonomous vehicles is quite long and the best conversations I had touched on them. They include insurance (one of Arity’s favorite topics!); how to create spaces for people to safely get in and out of vehicles; car dealerships; job displacement; and system interoperability. Thank you to everyone who spent their time at SXSW talking about what it takes to bring a complicated technology to market.