Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in iHeart radio and I love all
Speaker 1: things tech. And in our last episode, I talked about
Speaker 1: the two thousand seven Urban Challenge as the autonomous car
Speaker 1: competition that DARPA held, and they were specifically trying to
Speaker 1: spur on innovation in driver less car technology. One of
Speaker 1: the elements I didn't really talk about was how cooperative
Speaker 1: the experience was. I mentioned that there was sort of
Speaker 1: this air of cooperation, and I talked about how Dave
Speaker 1: Hall had created a lidar tool that ended up being
Speaker 1: used by lots of the teams, but it went well
Speaker 1: beyond that. Teams were eager to share their approaches and
Speaker 1: their technologies each other, the algorithms they were using for
Speaker 1: decision making processes. There was a lot of excitement as
Speaker 1: these different, very intelligent groups of people got together and
Speaker 1: began to cross pollinate their ideas. The real goal wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily to beat out everyone else, although of course everyone
Speaker 1: would have liked to have been on the winning team.
Speaker 1: But really the real goal was to overcome this huge
Speaker 1: engineering challenge of developing technologies that would be necessary for
Speaker 1: a car to maneuver through an urban environment safely under
Speaker 1: its own power, following all applicable traffic laws, and integrating
Speaker 1: with human driven vehicles in that space. Some people like
Speaker 1: Sebastian Throne of Stanford Racing Team, would say that the
Speaker 1: greatest achievement to come out of the challenges wasn't winning
Speaker 1: top prize. It was when teams would share their knowledge
Speaker 1: and their experience with one another, allowing separate lines of
Speaker 1: research and development to start to converge, and it's set
Speaker 1: the ground for what would come next. Now, the challenges
Speaker 1: in two thousand four, two thousand five, and two thousand
Speaker 1: seven proved that autonomous cars could exist on some level,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the technology that went into making
Speaker 1: cars navigate and operate independently would go into other systems
Speaker 1: and other applications, stuff like various driver assist technologies like
Speaker 1: lane detection or automatic breaking. And it also encouraged some
Speaker 1: big companies to continue supporting efforts to making driver lest
Speaker 1: cars a reality. So one thing to acknowledge is, even
Speaker 1: if we were to say we're never going to be
Speaker 1: at a time where truly autonomous cars, ones that could
Speaker 1: take us from any starting location to Indy, any ending
Speaker 1: location that's connected by roads to our starting point. Even
Speaker 1: if we say that's never going to be possible, not
Speaker 1: truly rely Apple, what we can say is we've already
Speaker 1: seen numerous technologies that were spawned by these competitions that
Speaker 1: are we're not only going into cars today, but are
Speaker 1: saving lives in the process. So that's that's already a
Speaker 1: great outcome to this DARPA challenge, even if you, you know,
Speaker 1: again agree that ultimately this was to make more more
Speaker 1: automated military ground combat vehicles, and even in that case
Speaker 1: that was intended to help save soldiers lives. So that's
Speaker 1: a noble endeavor as well. But let's talk about some
Speaker 1: of the companies and organizations that formed in the wake
Speaker 1: of these grand challenges. You had General Motors and Carnegie
Speaker 1: Mellon University get together. They launched a research and development
Speaker 1: program called the Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab. Then you
Speaker 1: also had Volkswagen establish a similar effort with stand For University. Now,
Speaker 1: those academic research programs didn't receive nearly as much public
Speaker 1: attention as the other really big entity that got involved
Speaker 1: in the field not long after the challenges, and that
Speaker 1: would be Google, later known as Alphabet or way Mo.
Speaker 1: So Alphabets, the parent companies, the holding company under which
Speaker 1: UH the smaller companies and smaller by smaller, I just
Speaker 1: mean hierarchically would spin off. So you have like Google,
Speaker 1: which continues to focus on the core business of the
Speaker 1: overall company, but you have these other subsidiaries that are
Speaker 1: subsidiaries of Alphabet, not of Google anyway. One of those
Speaker 1: would be a division that was specifically in research and
Speaker 1: development in the area of autonomous cars. So in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, Sebastian Throne took a sabbatical from being a
Speaker 1: professor at Stanford to go work at Google for a
Speaker 1: short while. Turned out to be longer than a short while,
Speaker 1: but he and a team were hired on essentially to
Speaker 1: help develop Google's street view tool. That's the tool that's
Speaker 1: integrated into various maps systems that Google does and allows
Speaker 1: you to take a street level look at different locations.
Speaker 1: It was done by driving special cars outfitted with special
Speaker 1: cameras through all these different streets and all these different locations.
Speaker 1: They had about a year UH scheduled to try and
Speaker 1: map out all the roads they could in various major cities,
Speaker 1: and they ended up doing it in nine months, so
Speaker 1: it's pretty impressive anyway. That project has had plenty of
Speaker 1: news coverage, not just because of its utility, but also
Speaker 1: because of concerns about privacy and security. Not everyone is
Speaker 1: super crazy about the idea of using an online tool
Speaker 1: to virtually coast down streets and take a look at
Speaker 1: different addresses, not to mention possibly spying people that you
Speaker 1: recognize in places they should not be, but that's a
Speaker 1: topic for another time. In two thousand nine, Google would
Speaker 1: go a step further and secretly began testing autonomous vehicles.
Speaker 1: So they had been in development of that for a
Speaker 1: couple of years as well, and Sebastian Thron had worked
Speaker 1: on that. They were retrofitting Toyota Prius cars at first,
Speaker 1: and the goal was to conduct ten one hundred mile
Speaker 1: trips in those cars without interruption, So uninterrupted one mile
Speaker 1: trips with Toyota previous is ten times. Over the course
Speaker 1: of two thousand nine, Google would rack up more autonomously
Speaker 1: driven miles than had been accumulated over all previous years
Speaker 1: of experimentation among all autonomous car programs, so in one
Speaker 1: year they eclipsed everything that had come before it. In
Speaker 1: Sebastian Throne would officially join Google as a Google Fellow
Speaker 1: and found a secret research and development division within the
Speaker 1: company called Goal X. Now, among the many projects that
Speaker 1: division would focus on, the autonomous cars was just one
Speaker 1: would be the self driving cars, and Thron, having participated
Speaker 1: in all three of the DARPA challenges, had really deep
Speaker 1: contacts in that field, and he could call upon them
Speaker 1: to help solve difficult problems that remained in pursuit of
Speaker 1: the goal of a truly autonomous car that could interoperate
Speaker 1: with human society. So Thron ended up hiring people from
Speaker 1: the various competing teams of the DARPA challenges to join
Speaker 1: him at Google in developing further autonomous car technologies. Technically,
Speaker 1: the company had been doing this since two thousand seven. Really,
Speaker 1: Dave Hall, the guy who suited up lidar to make
Speaker 1: it an indispensable tool, became a billionaire through his work
Speaker 1: at Velo Dine. In the meantime, and read Whittaker over
Speaker 1: at Carnegie, Melon would continue teaching at that university, effectively
Speaker 1: training the next generation of roboticists and compute of scientists
Speaker 1: throughout the entire industry were continuing to develop machine learning
Speaker 1: strategies that would become useful in multiple applications, including teaching
Speaker 1: a car how to drive itself. There were numerous groups
Speaker 1: that thought, this is the real secret to developing a
Speaker 1: truly autonomous car is through machine learning. Not programming a
Speaker 1: car on what to do in any given situation, but
Speaker 1: teaching a car, sort of akin to how you would
Speaker 1: teach a young driver about how to conduct him or
Speaker 1: herself in a car. By this stage, Google's tests had
Speaker 1: drawn attention from the press. The New York Times published
Speaker 1: a piece in October twenty ten titled Google Cars drive
Speaker 1: themselves in Traffic. The article revealed that Google had been
Speaker 1: conducting tests in plain site for several months, but at
Speaker 1: that point had not commented on what those tests were
Speaker 1: all about, and the company was content with people just
Speaker 1: assuming that it was another Google street view car. There
Speaker 1: were fifteen engineers working on the project, and they had
Speaker 1: hired a dozen or so drivers whose job it was
Speaker 1: to monitor the performance of the vehicles and to take
Speaker 1: over if necessary. The engineers testing the vehicles had three
Speaker 1: main ways that they could take control back from the car.
Speaker 1: In each test vehicle, engineers had installed a button, a
Speaker 1: nice candy like red button that was on the right
Speaker 1: hand side of the driver so they could easily hit
Speaker 1: the button and that would switch controls to manual. But
Speaker 1: you can also do it if you tapped on the
Speaker 1: brakes or if you turned the steering wheel, the car
Speaker 1: would hand over a control to the driver. Google had
Speaker 1: a little hiccup in two thousand eleven, a public hiccup
Speaker 1: that was when one of its driver less vehicles was
Speaker 1: involved in a low speed car crash, and at the
Speaker 1: time everyone assumed this was the first uh in real
Speaker 1: world car crash with an autonomous car. However, this particular
Speaker 1: incident was only a very tiny hiccup because it soon
Speaker 1: became public that the car, the autonomous car, was actually
Speaker 1: in manual control mode at the time. The human driver
Speaker 1: behind the wheel was responsible for the accident, not the
Speaker 1: driver lest car technology. Google's driver lest cars would maintain
Speaker 1: a perfect safety record in autonomous mode until publicly. That's
Speaker 1: assuming if you say perfect safety record in the sense
Speaker 1: that the autonomous vehicles were not found to be at fault.
Speaker 1: There were incidents where autonomous cars were involved in car accidents,
Speaker 1: but in every case until two thousand sixteen, every public
Speaker 1: case it was determined that the other driver was at fault. Again,
Speaker 1: stress on public. I'll back to what I mean in
Speaker 1: just a few minutes. In two thousand twelve, Google began
Speaker 1: to expand its fleet of driverless cars. It added a
Speaker 1: Lexus r x f H to the mix, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Toyota Prius is Uh. They had a couple
Speaker 1: of others as well, and the company began to develop
Speaker 1: its own sensors and began to replace the off the
Speaker 1: shelf kind of stuff it was buying. I mean off
Speaker 1: the shelf if you know which shelves to look at,
Speaker 1: and still pretty exclusive materials, but now the company was
Speaker 1: developing stuff in house purpose built for their own cars.
Speaker 1: Two thousand twelve was also when a few Google employees
Speaker 1: were allowed to start testing this technology on highways around
Speaker 1: Google's campus, so it was outside of just the direct
Speaker 1: team working on the project. Now other Google employees could
Speaker 1: end up driving an autonomous car and allowing it to
Speaker 1: operate an autonomous mode in specific regions and under specific
Speaker 1: sets of circumstance answers. There are a lot of different
Speaker 1: rules in place to participate in this, so you couldn't
Speaker 1: just turn it on autonomous and sit back all the time.
Speaker 1: And two thousand twelve was when the state of Nevada
Speaker 1: made history by becoming the first state to license autonomous
Speaker 1: cars for use on state roads. California would follow suit
Speaker 1: that same year, but the bill that Governor Jerry Brown
Speaker 1: had signed would only take effect starting in two thousand fifteen.
Speaker 1: In January two thousand thirteen, Audi and Toyota both showed
Speaker 1: off autonomous vehicle concept designs at c S, so it
Speaker 1: showed that lots of UH entities were still very much
Speaker 1: interested in driverless cars, not just Google. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and fourteen, Google unveiled a prototype electric car that had
Speaker 1: a top speed of twenty five miles per hour. There
Speaker 1: was no steering wheel, no break, no accelerator, no controls
Speaker 1: to allow a human driver to actually take manual control
Speaker 1: of the car. Inside the car, the car did have
Speaker 1: some control, but there were buttons that would tell it
Speaker 1: when it could go and when it should stop. So
Speaker 1: these vehicles were not intended for commercial use. They were
Speaker 1: part of Google's R and D to to test out
Speaker 1: the possibility of a vehicle that doesn't even have manual controls.
Speaker 1: It requires a lot of trust be put into the system. Now.
Speaker 1: To be fair, these were very limited in their scope.
Speaker 1: Top speed of twenty five hour suggests that you would
Speaker 1: use them on like residential streets and stuff. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: use them on a highway. They wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: get up to speed. In two thousand and fourteen, the
Speaker 1: state of California past legislation requiring any company operating autonomous
Speaker 1: vehicles in the state to submit reports on any accident
Speaker 1: involving a vehicle operating an autonomous mode that would result
Speaker 1: in quote damage of property or in bodily injury or
Speaker 1: death end quote. After that point, Google would report several accidents,
Speaker 1: like more than three dozen. Most of those appeared to
Speaker 1: be the fault of human drivers, not the autonomous systems.
Speaker 1: But according to some Google executives, there were some accidents
Speaker 1: that happened between two thousand eleven and when this piece
Speaker 1: of legislation was signed in two thousand fourteen that Google
Speaker 1: chose to keep quiet, and the logic that the company
Speaker 1: used was that, well, those accidents happened before that law
Speaker 1: was passed, so it doesn't really apply to those. We
Speaker 1: don't need to talk about accidents that have already happened.
Speaker 1: Just from this point forward, we'll talk about it. One
Speaker 1: of those accidents involved someone who had participated in two
Speaker 1: of the DARPA Grand Challenges, someone who was working for
Speaker 1: Google and who had become something of a thorn in
Speaker 1: the company's side, and that person was Anthony Lewandowski. I'll
Speaker 1: explain more in a second, but first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor Lewandowski. If you listen
Speaker 1: to the previous episodes, he was the guy who competed
Speaker 1: using a self balancing motorcycle in the two thousand four
Speaker 1: and two thousand five Grand Challenge competitions. The name of
Speaker 1: that motorcycle, by the way, no big surprise, was ghost Writer.
Speaker 1: He had joined Google in two thousand seven to work
Speaker 1: with Sebastian Thrun on the Google street View project, and
Speaker 1: Lewandowski started a few companies related to autonomous cars. He
Speaker 1: had developed these technologies for ghost Writer, and then he
Speaker 1: started some startups that were focused on specific elements that
Speaker 1: he had created for a ghost Writer, including one that
Speaker 1: used spinning light AR as a sensing technology. He didn't
Speaker 1: invent that, but he did develop our start up a
Speaker 1: company that specialized in that then he pushed Google to
Speaker 1: buy the tech his other companies happened to be making,
Speaker 1: which you might think is a little questionable. Lewandowski was
Speaker 1: in a position to market his own company's products for
Speaker 1: a project he was working on with Google, so he
Speaker 1: was in charge of hardware for autonomous cars over at Google,
Speaker 1: and then said, well, for us to outfit these cars,
Speaker 1: let's buy this tech from this these two companies. Oh,
Speaker 1: I happen to own those two companies, So I'm using
Speaker 1: the money from the company I work for to funnel
Speaker 1: into companies I own. People began to have questions about that,
Speaker 1: but it totally worked. As people at Google learned about
Speaker 1: what had gone on, they started to get a little
Speaker 1: concerned about this and about Lewandowski. Uh. It got worse
Speaker 1: when it became known that Lewandowski was talking to some competitors,
Speaker 1: some other companies outside of Google about selling them the
Speaker 1: same technology. This was complicated because he was operating those
Speaker 1: businesses outside of Google. He was a business owner and
Speaker 1: and those technically didn't belong to Google. But at the
Speaker 1: same time he was working for Google, so it seemed
Speaker 1: like he might be undercutting Google or helping out their competitors,
Speaker 1: which was complicated. Larry Page, the head of Google, essentially
Speaker 1: directed the company to acquire Lewandowski's businesses rather than risk
Speaker 1: him leaving the company to oversee the businesses himself. Lewandowski
Speaker 1: had indicated that he might leave Google in pursuit of
Speaker 1: leading up these these two companies that he had founded,
Speaker 1: although his commitment to that course of action is something
Speaker 1: that people have questioned that perhaps he just said this
Speaker 1: as a way to encourage Larry Page to shell out
Speaker 1: millions and millions of dollars to acquire these companies. According
Speaker 1: to a report in The New Yorker, several people in
Speaker 1: Project Chauffeur, which was the name the code name for
Speaker 1: the driver less vehicle program at Google, felt that it
Speaker 1: was a mistake to get so tightly connected to levindal Ski.
Speaker 1: Several of the team members questioned his commitment to Google,
Speaker 1: as well as his ethical sensibilities, and this would get
Speaker 1: pushed further after an alleged incident in two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: So here's how the story goes. There was a Google
Speaker 1: executive named Isaac Taylor who was working on Project Chauffeur,
Speaker 1: and he took a leave of absence from the project
Speaker 1: it was a paternity leave when he became a new
Speaker 1: father in two thousand eleven. When he got back to Google,
Speaker 1: he found out that Lewandowski had made some unauthorized changes
Speaker 1: to the software that guided the driverless cars. So up
Speaker 1: to that point, Google had really placed some pretty tight
Speaker 1: restrictions on the routes that these driverless cars would be
Speaker 1: allowed to take an autonomous mode. This is a type
Speaker 1: of geo fencing, where you restrict the operating parameters for
Speaker 1: a vehicle. The goal was to gather data through many
Speaker 1: miles of travel, but to control that process by limiting
Speaker 1: where the cars could actually drive under a top aymous mode.
Speaker 1: Lewandowski apparently felt this was not satisfactory, so he made
Speaker 1: changes to the code to let the autonomous cars drive
Speaker 1: on routes that previously had been forbidden. Taylor and Lewandowski
Speaker 1: had a rather spirited argument by all accounts, over at Google,
Speaker 1: and at that point Lewandowski demanded that Taylor accompany him
Speaker 1: on a ride in an autonomous car to show that
Speaker 1: this was a good idea. So, according to the story,
Speaker 1: the two people left in a retrofitted Prius and then
Speaker 1: hit the California Rhodes now I'm going to quote the
Speaker 1: New Yorker piece directly here. This is from an article
Speaker 1: titled did Uber steal Google's intellectual Property? And it was
Speaker 1: written by Charles Duig, and it was published October twenty two,
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, so you can find this. It's a
Speaker 1: very recent article. And here's Charles Dwig's description of this incident.
Speaker 1: The car went onto a freeway where it traveled past
Speaker 1: an on ramp. According to people with knowledge of events
Speaker 1: that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a camera.
Speaker 1: A human driver could easily have handled the situation by
Speaker 1: slowing down and laying the camera merge into traffic, but
Speaker 1: Google software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued
Speaker 1: speeding down the freeway side by side. The cameras driver
Speaker 1: jerked his car onto the right shoulder, then, apparently trying
Speaker 1: to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left. The
Speaker 1: camera pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Lewandowski,
Speaker 1: who acted as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid
Speaker 1: colliding with the camera, causing Taylor to injure his spine
Speaker 1: so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries. The Prius
Speaker 1: regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving
Speaker 1: the camera behind. Lewandowski and Taylor didn't know how badly
Speaker 1: damaged the camera was. They didn't go back to check
Speaker 1: on the other driver or to see if anyone else
Speaker 1: had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made
Speaker 1: inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that
Speaker 1: a self driving algorithm had contributed to the accident. That's
Speaker 1: not a great story. I mean it's written very well.
Speaker 1: No offense to the New Yorker or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not a great thing to have in
Speaker 1: your historical record, no matter who you are, and it's
Speaker 1: particularly bad for a company that used to have the
Speaker 1: motto don't be evil. Now Lewandowski would actually double down
Speaker 1: on the results of this incident. Rather than saying, whoops,
Speaker 1: my bad, I done did something terrible that caused damage,
Speaker 1: impossibly injury, certainly injury to his coworker, he ended up
Speaker 1: saying that the incident actually provided proof that there was
Speaker 1: work needed on the algorithms, and that Google could learn
Speaker 1: from the mistake, and that this was kind of that
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley philosophy of failure is good because you learn
Speaker 1: from failure, okay well. The article from The New Yorker
Speaker 1: also states that there was at least one accident that
Speaker 1: happened while a driverless car was in autonomous mode that
Speaker 1: did not get reported to to the police or to
Speaker 1: the press. According to the article, a car nicknamed Kit
Speaker 1: after good Old Night Writer, was rear ended at an
Speaker 1: intersection when the autonomous car breaked suddenly after being unable
Speaker 1: to differentiate a yellow light from a red light, so
Speaker 1: they stopped short or stopped too suddenly, and the car
Speaker 1: behind them was unable to stop and ran into them.
Speaker 1: As for Lewandowski, he would stay at Google until two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen, when he'd leave in order to go
Speaker 1: found a new company called Auto O t t O.
Speaker 1: Auto would consult with Uber for their driverless car program.
Speaker 1: Google executives would allege that Leven Owlski took proprietary information
Speaker 1: and trade secrets with him in this move. They had
Speaker 1: proof that he had downloaded and transferred an enormous number
Speaker 1: of files, though there were questions about how valuable those
Speaker 1: files actually were, and Uber would ultimately fire Lewandowski as
Speaker 1: this case developed. The actual trial happened in early two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen and it was marked with a lot of messy,
Speaker 1: complicated legal maneuvers on all sides. One day I may
Speaker 1: have to do a full episode just on that lawsuit
Speaker 1: and what came out of it. But we can skip
Speaker 1: to the end. Google's Weymo, because that's what the that's
Speaker 1: what Project Chauffeur evolved into, was a subsidiary company called
Speaker 1: Weymo would have ultimately settled out of court with Uber.
Speaker 1: All right back to driverless cars in the same year
Speaker 1: that Lewandowski would leave Google. We get to that publicly
Speaker 1: acknowledged accident that was the fault of Google's autonomous technology.
Speaker 1: So this was the first time that the public heard
Speaker 1: about a traffic accident that was quote unquote caused by
Speaker 1: Google's driverless car tech. It happened at another intersection, No
Speaker 1: big surprise there. Here's the description from the incident report
Speaker 1: with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and it goes
Speaker 1: like this. A Google Lexus Model autonomous vehicle Google a
Speaker 1: V was traveling in autonomous mode eastbound on El Camino
Speaker 1: Real in a real I guess in mountain view in
Speaker 1: the far right hand lane, approaching the Castro Street intersection.
Speaker 1: As the Google A V approached the intersection, it signaled
Speaker 1: its intent to make a right turn on the Red
Speaker 1: onto Castro Street. The Google a V then moved to
Speaker 1: the right hand side of the lane to pass traffic
Speaker 1: in the same lane that was stopped at the intersection
Speaker 1: and proceeding straight. However, the Google a V had to
Speaker 1: come to a stop and go around sandbags positioned around
Speaker 1: a storm drain that was blocking path. When the light
Speaker 1: turned green, traffic in the lane continued past the Google
Speaker 1: a V. After a few cars had passed, the Google
Speaker 1: a V began to proceed back into the center of
Speaker 1: the lane to pass the sandbags. A public transit bus
Speaker 1: was approaching from behind the Google a V. Test drivers
Speaker 1: saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror, but
Speaker 1: believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the
Speaker 1: Google a V to continue. Approximately three seconds later, as
Speaker 1: the Google a V was re entering the center of
Speaker 1: the lane, it made contact with the side of the bus.
Speaker 1: The Google a V was operating in autonomous mode and
Speaker 1: traveling at less than two miles per hour, and the
Speaker 1: bus was traveling at about fifteen miles per hour at
Speaker 1: the time of contact. The Google a V sustained body
Speaker 1: damage to the left front fender to the left front wheel,
Speaker 1: and one of its driver's side sensors. There were no
Speaker 1: injuries reported at the scene, so, in other words, this
Speaker 1: was a pretty minor crash all things considered, and the
Speaker 1: report even managed to make it sound like while Google
Speaker 1: would not dispute that this was the fault of the
Speaker 1: driverless car, there were still some shade to cast at
Speaker 1: the bus driver, who was quote unquote expected to stop
Speaker 1: or slow down. So publicly it sounded like driverless cars
Speaker 1: were doing really well around six though in self limited
Speaker 1: tests we weren't seeing autonomous cars sent into unfamiliar territory
Speaker 1: at this point, and assuming the New Yorker article is accurate,
Speaker 1: and I have no reason to assume otherwise, there were
Speaker 1: at least several incidents that could have changed public perception
Speaker 1: about how safe those cars really were. They were just
Speaker 1: being kept on the hush hush. I've got more to
Speaker 1: say about Google and other companies and driverless cars in
Speaker 1: just a second, but first let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. We'll come back to Google in
Speaker 1: a moment, but first let's chat a little bit about
Speaker 1: some of the other companies that are pursuing driverless car technology.
Speaker 1: One of them I've already mentioned a couple of times,
Speaker 1: and that would be Uber. Now. At the two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen re Slash Code conference the Code Conferences was known
Speaker 1: as Travis Kalenik, who is CEO and or was the
Speaker 1: CEO and the co founder of Uber, talked about autonomous
Speaker 1: cars in a pretty ominous way, I would say. He said,
Speaker 1: quote the reason Uber could be expensive is you're paying
Speaker 1: for the other dude in the car when there is
Speaker 1: no other dude in the car. The cost of taking
Speaker 1: an Uber anywhere is cheaper even on a road trip.
Speaker 1: End quote. And by dude in the car, kalen Nick
Speaker 1: was talking about the driver. So here's a guy who
Speaker 1: is the head of a ride haling service, a company
Speaker 1: that employs thousands of drivers, say yeah, but man, can't
Speaker 1: you just imagine what the world would be like if
Speaker 1: we didn't have to pay those drivers. The message was
Speaker 1: that trips would cost less for customers. It would also
Speaker 1: mean that Uber would be able to keep more of
Speaker 1: the money. It wouldn't have to share any cash out
Speaker 1: to any employees, at least not any drivers, and it
Speaker 1: would put the company's own drivers out of work. If
Speaker 1: such a future were to come true, it was more
Speaker 1: than a little harsh. I would say, I would call
Speaker 1: it demoralizing if I were driving for Uber and I
Speaker 1: heard that the company's leadership was saying, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to replace you with a robot. It makes me feel
Speaker 1: not so great about my job. Klinik also put forth
Speaker 1: an idea that frequently comes along with the concept of
Speaker 1: autonomous cars, which would be the end of private car ownership.
Speaker 1: Rather than purchasing a car, at least in a densely
Speaker 1: in populated environment, you would just use a driver less
Speaker 1: vehicle to take you places. The cost per trip could
Speaker 1: potentially be low enough that you would actually be saving
Speaker 1: money compared to purchasing your own car, plus paying insurance
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff, not to mention maintenance
Speaker 1: and parking and that kind of thing. All of those
Speaker 1: payments would be gone. You would just be paying on
Speaker 1: a per trip basis. And in fact, a lot of
Speaker 1: the futures involving driverless cars, a lot of the future
Speaker 1: scenarios that various people project, assume that we're mostly going
Speaker 1: to be interacting with fleets owned by car hailing services
Speaker 1: like Uber and Lift. We won't own these driverless cars
Speaker 1: and these visions of the future, because why would we
Speaker 1: We would just use a ride hailing service. Again, this
Speaker 1: only makes sense if you're living in a fairly densely
Speaker 1: populated area, UH city or a suburb. It makes less
Speaker 1: sense the further out from a city you live, but
Speaker 1: you could see it working at least in some scenarios.
Speaker 1: Uber's pursuit has made plenty of headline over the years,
Speaker 1: including some very grim ones. In March two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: a woman crossing Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona, was struck
Speaker 1: by a self driving Uber vehicle. It was actually in
Speaker 1: autonomous mode, and the woman died from her injuries. The
Speaker 1: car was a Volvo x C nine suv. There were
Speaker 1: no passengers in the vehicle apart from the human operator. UH.
Speaker 1: The human operator was supposed to act as emergency backup,
Speaker 1: but again, the car was in self driving mode at
Speaker 1: the time of the accident. UH. Google would go on
Speaker 1: to say that the driver was distracted and that Google's
Speaker 1: system would have been able to respond appropriately in time,
Speaker 1: which maybe true, but I'm not sure as the classiest
Speaker 1: thing to say in the wake of someone's death. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Uber would suspend all autonomous testing in Arizona as well
Speaker 1: as in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Toronto. In response, and
Speaker 1: the state of Arizona was essentially really come down on
Speaker 1: Uber and Uber would just completely pull the plug in
Speaker 1: Arizona for the time being anyway, as far as autonomous
Speaker 1: cars go. An investigation revealed that the possible cause of
Speaker 1: the accident was that the vehicle's emergency braking system had
Speaker 1: been disabled when an autonomous mode. Again, since that accident,
Speaker 1: Uber has pulled out of Arizona. They've also laid off
Speaker 1: some of the employees who are working in the autonomous
Speaker 1: car division. UH they have petition to renew testing and
Speaker 1: other cities. But UM and they're not done, you know.
Speaker 1: Even though they had a setback, they're not out of
Speaker 1: the driverless car business. They're still working toward developing a
Speaker 1: driverless car fleet. In fact, the company had ordered twenty
Speaker 1: four thousand self driving Volvo SUVs, which are scheduled to
Speaker 1: begin shipping in two thousand nineteen. Toyota also announced it
Speaker 1: would invest a half a billion dollars in Uber. This
Speaker 1: was an addition to a obviously existing partnership between the
Speaker 1: two companies, and that Toyota was going to incorporate Uber
Speaker 1: self driving technology into its C and M and events
Speaker 1: for its own sort of a ride sharing fleet service. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Lift is also chasing after a self driving autonomous fleet.
Speaker 1: UM they made a partnership with General Motors and GM
Speaker 1: has its own initiative for a self driving fleet that
Speaker 1: one's called Cruise. That on was scheduled to launch also
Speaker 1: in two thousand nineteen. Ford also has plans for self
Speaker 1: driving cars and a ride sharing capacity. Like I said,
Speaker 1: that seems to be the the big model is the
Speaker 1: idea that these cars would be prohibitively expensive for most consumers,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't make a whole lot of business sense
Speaker 1: to build them out for your average private car owner.
Speaker 1: It makes more sense to build them out for a
Speaker 1: ride sharing service where you will generate revenue over a
Speaker 1: long term, as opposed to trying to sell them for
Speaker 1: a profit to a single person. And uh Ford, however,
Speaker 1: they're there, uh their timelines a little more modest. They're
Speaker 1: looking at starting in twe Then there's Tesla and it's
Speaker 1: autopilot feature, which I should add has been marketed as
Speaker 1: a driver assist feature. It has not been marketed as
Speaker 1: a truly autonomous vehicle option, or at least that's not
Speaker 1: the official corporate messaging. Tesla can get a little cheeky
Speaker 1: with the way they message stuff out, but all the
Speaker 1: official use cases state that as a driver, you're supposed
Speaker 1: to keep your hands on the wheel at all times.
Speaker 1: You're not supposed to give up control. Uh, you can
Speaker 1: allow it to take over, but you aren't to just
Speaker 1: sit back and watch it happen, which, of course has
Speaker 1: not stopped people from doing just that thing, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that the company has said don't do that thing.
Speaker 1: The company initially rolled out the autopilot feature as a
Speaker 1: software update, which is actually really cool. The idea of
Speaker 1: rolling out a software update and sending it out to
Speaker 1: cars and suddenly they have this autopilot feature that's really neat.
Speaker 1: That's something that you wouldn't have seen, you know, five
Speaker 1: years ago with cars. So that happened back in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, so I guess you'd see it three years ago,
Speaker 1: but not five years ago. But this semi autonomous system
Speaker 1: has been involved in at least two fatal car crashes
Speaker 1: over the last few years. The first happened in Steen
Speaker 1: when a Tesla car and autopilot mode collided with a
Speaker 1: truck that was turning across the path of traffic. The
Speaker 1: Tesla failed to detect the truck was there and was
Speaker 1: unable to stop in time. The second fatal accident happened
Speaker 1: in when a Tesla vehicle and autopilot collided with a
Speaker 1: concrete highway lane divider at high speed. Then we get
Speaker 1: back to way MOW. That's spinoff from Google that's probably
Speaker 1: the most famous of all the autonomous vehicle projects. According
Speaker 1: to the company, it's test vehicles have driven more than
Speaker 1: ten million miles in autonomous mode, though to Lewandowski's point,
Speaker 1: some considerations should be dedicated to the fact that many
Speaker 1: of those miles were over very specific routes. So yes,
Speaker 1: millions of miles traveled, but if they are millions of
Speaker 1: the same miles, that has limited utility. In December two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, Weymo is launching, or perhaps has already launched,
Speaker 1: depending on when you hear this, a self driving service
Speaker 1: available to people who have opted into the company's early
Speaker 1: writer program and the services in Phoenix, Arizona, which I
Speaker 1: assume is a delicate matter in the wake of the
Speaker 1: tragedy that happened in Tempe, Arizona in spring of with
Speaker 1: that Uber crash. The service is called Weymo one and
Speaker 1: like other ride hailing services, customers will use an app
Speaker 1: to hail a car. They will designate where they want
Speaker 1: to be picked up where they want to be dropped off.
Speaker 1: The cost of the ride will be dependent upon actors,
Speaker 1: like what time of day it is and how far
Speaker 1: away the trip or how how much distance the trip
Speaker 1: will take. The cars are Chrysler PACIFICA minivans, and they
Speaker 1: do have some controls on the inside for passengers to
Speaker 1: use in various situations. There's a button that can initiate
Speaker 1: essentially an emergency pull over, so you can have the
Speaker 1: car pull over at any point during the ride. UH.
Speaker 1: There's also a contact support button that will put a
Speaker 1: passenger in UH in contact with customer support. So it
Speaker 1: sounds like two thousand nine is going to be a
Speaker 1: really big and potentially scary experiment to see if autonomous
Speaker 1: cars are really ready to enter into real service, at
Speaker 1: least in limited markets, and it may well be that
Speaker 1: the results will see will show these vehicles are more safe, reliable,
Speaker 1: and efficient than vehicles that are operated by human drivers.
Speaker 1: But if there are more accidents or evidence of companies
Speaker 1: trying to cover up at SENS. That's gonna be a
Speaker 1: big problem. It also shows how there's a huge disconnect
Speaker 1: between that Silicon Valley philosophy of fail big, fail fast
Speaker 1: fail often, you know, making risky decisions, and Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: is considered to be a really good trait, not a
Speaker 1: bad one. Being risk averse is a bad trait in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. It's better to keep throwing yourself out there
Speaker 1: as hard as you can without any fear of failure,
Speaker 1: because if you do succeed, you've gotta reap incredible benefits.
Speaker 1: And if you fail, well, you just you learn something
Speaker 1: in that process and then you just do better the
Speaker 1: next time. You know, people like Lewandowski appear to embrace
Speaker 1: that philosophy. But on the other hand, when you get
Speaker 1: to your average schmos like me, then you have the
Speaker 1: reality of the situation sync in. Because these aren't just
Speaker 1: lines of code in software. These are technologies that could
Speaker 1: dramatically change someone's life in really horrible ways if something
Speaker 1: is wrong. See if I use an app, Let's say
Speaker 1: I'm using I don't know a pizza delivery app, and
Speaker 1: let's say something screws up and my pizza is lost
Speaker 1: in the ether like that, that order never really goes through,
Speaker 1: and I'm staying around waiting for pizza and I'm hungry. Well,
Speaker 1: that sucks, but I'm gonna live. I can order another pizza.
Speaker 1: But if an autonomous car messes up, someone could die.
Speaker 1: So failing big failing often in the in the sense
Speaker 1: of autonomous cars in the real world, is what I
Speaker 1: would argue an irresponsible approach. And yes, we learn more
Speaker 1: through our failures than we do through our successes, but again,
Speaker 1: when it comes to human lives, you can't be too
Speaker 1: cavalier about that. Now, this naturally leads into what will
Speaker 1: be the topic of the next episode of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: which is a broader, more philosophical discussion about autonomous cars
Speaker 1: and ethics, not to mention realistic versus un balistic views
Speaker 1: of where we are with the technology and where we
Speaker 1: should be or where we need to be in order
Speaker 1: to have a broad rollout, so to speak, of the tech.
Speaker 1: So in the next episode, I'm going to spend more
Speaker 1: time talking about those sort of big picture ideas, everything
Speaker 1: from the different levels of autonomy two where we are
Speaker 1: two various problems with some of these approaches even Weymo,
Speaker 1: which I would argue despite the the alleged incidents that
Speaker 1: went underreported between two thousand eleven and two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: it appears to be the most responsible of the the
Speaker 1: large projects I've read about again Big Picture of You,
Speaker 1: even Weymo. Their approach has certain drawbacks that will talk
Speaker 1: about in the next episode. Things that UH mean that
Speaker 1: it may work in most situations. When you get into
Speaker 1: unusual situations, which happen all the time, uh, it doesn't
Speaker 1: work nearly as well. But that's what we'll talk about
Speaker 1: our next episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, whether it's a huge topic like driverless
Speaker 1: cars that would require multiple episodes, or something where you
Speaker 1: want to really focused episode about specific technology or a
Speaker 1: person in tech. Maybe there's someone you would like me
Speaker 1: to interview, let me know. Send me an email the
Speaker 1: addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or
Speaker 1: go to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: There you can find the different ways to contact me
Speaker 1: on social I look forward to hearing from you. Don't
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