Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor and how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm driving in my car. I turn on the radio.
Speaker 1: You want to keep going. I kind of expected you.
Speaker 1: I could pull you a little closer, but I'm sure
Speaker 1: you would say no. I'm going to say no, believe me.
Speaker 1: That's going to lead into our discussion. But before we
Speaker 1: get into that, we've got a little, um well, Facebook feedback.
Speaker 1: Chris just gets so tickled that I do that now.
Speaker 1: And plus yea, the shouting because because people tell me
Speaker 1: they missed the old listener male intro. You guys are
Speaker 1: that listener mail was yeah, a little. The listener mail
Speaker 1: people are masochists. I mean I'm not. I enjoyed doing
Speaker 1: it too. And anyway, let's get to the actual feedback,
Speaker 1: shall we. Phil left this Facebook feedback, not that Phil,
Speaker 1: He says, Hey, guys, since fallout, New Vegas is coming
Speaker 1: out this Tuesday. You should probably do a podcast in
Speaker 1: the whole series, you know you want to, Uh, we'll
Speaker 1: fill you're you're right. I mean I love Fallout. I
Speaker 1: love Fallout three in particular. That's really where I started playing.
Speaker 1: The series was followed three when it came out for
Speaker 1: the Xbox three sixty. But we usually focus on games
Speaker 1: that have an even longer history than Fallout does, or
Speaker 1: is something that's complete, or there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: controversy around it, particularly when you think the game's never
Speaker 1: gonna come out. But that's not the case. We Fallout
Speaker 1: New Vegas, and since we don't cover new games, we
Speaker 1: don't cover news as it were. Uh, we're just gonna
Speaker 1: have to leave it to the fact that the games
Speaker 1: are pretty cool. Also, if you want to annoy Veronica Belmont,
Speaker 1: you can ask her why she didn't voice the character
Speaker 1: of Veronica and instead it was Felicia Day because she
Speaker 1: loves that. Don't tell her I said it. Tell her
Speaker 1: that Josh and Chuck of stuff. You shouldn't have said it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's that's funny because we get a lot of
Speaker 1: questions now that you mentioned it. Um, now that we
Speaker 1: don't get so many questions about how to tech people's
Speaker 1: computer problems, which is good because it's kind of difficult
Speaker 1: to do that in our In our roles, we we
Speaker 1: do get a lot of questions about what product is
Speaker 1: better than another product, or which computer to choose or
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and it's difficult for us because we
Speaker 1: don't do reviews at how stuff works dot com. The
Speaker 1: site doesn't really do review um, you know, entries or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Occasionally we'll talk about something on the blogs,
Speaker 1: but not in not really as a product review, and
Speaker 1: it's sort of difficult for us to tell you, you you know,
Speaker 1: which model of headphone to buy or which video game
Speaker 1: is worth your money. Yeah, I mean, of course we
Speaker 1: we talked to other journalists and can point you in
Speaker 1: a ton of different directions as far as quality resource
Speaker 1: resources on that. And unfortunately, in this particular case, I've
Speaker 1: never played any of the Fallout series, although I was
Speaker 1: aware of it from the very from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: It was one of those games that I always meant
Speaker 1: to get to and then never did. It's it's definitely
Speaker 1: an interesting series and I am eager to play Fallout
Speaker 1: New Vegas. Actually, my wife last night offered to drive
Speaker 1: over and pick up a copy for me. But I
Speaker 1: had just purchased three new games, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I can't justify spending that much on yet another new
Speaker 1: game after I just bought three something. Maybe we can
Speaker 1: mention it later. You can tell us what you think
Speaker 1: when you get around to it. Sure, Yeah, that'll be
Speaker 1: sometime in There are a lot of titles right now.
Speaker 1: So let's go on to the actual topic of the
Speaker 1: day and the today. We're going to talk about autonomous vehicles,
Speaker 1: self driving cars, right, and UM, I have a I
Speaker 1: have a little statistic to throw out before we really
Speaker 1: dive into this. So according to the Texas Transport Station Institute,
Speaker 1: which does these big annual studies on traffic and and uh,
Speaker 1: commute times that kind of stuff across the United States.
Speaker 1: Of course they're big different Texas. Yeah, yeah, don't mess
Speaker 1: with them, but they do state by state. They don't
Speaker 1: they don't constran just Texas. Uh. They calculated using new calculations. Actually,
Speaker 1: they just came out with a new way of calculating,
Speaker 1: a new method, a new method, right, a new algorithm
Speaker 1: relate to to calculate averages that they think will be
Speaker 1: more accurate than previous ones. Um. But they said that
Speaker 1: the average annual delay in hours due to traffic in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, which is the latest that they had
Speaker 1: data available, was around twenty nine hours per year. That's
Speaker 1: the average. The worst city in the United States. Can
Speaker 1: you guess do we live in it? No? Where we
Speaker 1: live in the third worst DC, DC second worst is
Speaker 1: worse than Atlanta and d C l A. I love
Speaker 1: l A. Los Angeles. You top out the nation was
Speaker 1: sixty nine point five hours of delay each year due
Speaker 1: to traffic. So yeah, almost three full days lost every
Speaker 1: year sitting in the car due to traffic. Wow. So uh.
Speaker 1: There are ways that we could address these traffic problems.
Speaker 1: The traditional ways you build more roads, which unfortunately turns
Speaker 1: out doesn't really help so much. Just means you get
Speaker 1: more people on the road. That's funny because I thought
Speaker 1: where we were going we don't need roads. Nice. But
Speaker 1: another method is to try and take the human element
Speaker 1: out of the equation. Yeah, you know what, it's it's funny. Um.
Speaker 1: Long before we came to work for Discovery Communications, UM,
Speaker 1: I fell in love with a series of articles written
Speaker 1: by Hannah Holmes on Discovery dot com, which, according to
Speaker 1: my iPad, they still exist, they're still up there. She
Speaker 1: did a series called The Skinny On and Uh, one
Speaker 1: of my favorites was traffic jam ghosts. You know those
Speaker 1: times when you're you're backed up in traffic on the
Speaker 1: expressway or you know, even on a regular street, and
Speaker 1: you know it's just it's just bad everything. All the
Speaker 1: lanes are backed up and you're inching along and then
Speaker 1: suddenly there's nothing there and everybody's driving like normal. Well,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, that is due to human error.
Speaker 1: Like one, there was something there at some point, but
Speaker 1: because people are not all moving at the same rate
Speaker 1: of speed, um, it takes a while for that that
Speaker 1: glut to dissipate again. Yeah, there's a that's that's a
Speaker 1: very good point because we're not only we're humans. We
Speaker 1: all have our own reactions in our own way of
Speaker 1: dealing with things, and uh, and so something tiny can
Speaker 1: develop into a huge traffic jam. Let's say that. Let's
Speaker 1: say that the traffic is heavy but moving right. Uh,
Speaker 1: And you think, well, as long as the road has
Speaker 1: the capacity to hold the number of cars that are
Speaker 1: on it, traffic should keep moving. There's no reason why
Speaker 1: traffic should stop. Until you think, all right, well, someone
Speaker 1: taps on their brakes. Now the person behind that car
Speaker 1: will react in one of various ways, not they just
Speaker 1: tap on their brakes. If everyone just tapped on their brakes,
Speaker 1: then you would have a slight slowing, but everything would
Speaker 1: keep moving. But some people will hit their brakes harder,
Speaker 1: or they will move into another lane, which will then
Speaker 1: cause someone else behind them to react. And this is
Speaker 1: a domino effect, and it will keep going back and
Speaker 1: it will cause traffic jams and congestion. Uh. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: you can always have an event that's much more severe
Speaker 1: than that, like a crash or uh, some debris in
Speaker 1: the road or weather conditions or whatever, or ladders in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: or ladders or you know, or zebras there was the
Speaker 1: time the zebra got on the highway. At any rate,
Speaker 1: those things can also clearly cause traffic. But but a
Speaker 1: lot of it does come from just that initial human
Speaker 1: reaction to an event that then balloons out of control.
Speaker 1: And as far as traffic is concerned, as other people
Speaker 1: react to that first person's reaction, so it just it
Speaker 1: becomes a chain reaction or don't react, in which case
Speaker 1: there's another accident, which right, and and there doesn't even
Speaker 1: necessarily have to be an accident at all. It could,
Speaker 1: like I said, just be as simple as someone tapping
Speaker 1: on the brakes. So creating an automated driving vehicle in
Speaker 1: a way, sounds like this could help take care of
Speaker 1: this sort of problem because the automated driving vehicles are
Speaker 1: going to react much more quickly than humans can, and
Speaker 1: theoretically in a way that's going to be safer than
Speaker 1: just a human like quick gut reaction. Also, they don't
Speaker 1: get distracted by stuff like the pretty girl in the
Speaker 1: car next to you, Hey, baby, how are you doing cars?
Speaker 1: Or the or say something something on the side of
Speaker 1: the road, or or the song that came on the
Speaker 1: radio is the song that you hate the most in
Speaker 1: the world or you love the most in the world,
Speaker 1: And so your attention is pulled away from the road
Speaker 1: for just a little bit while you either you know,
Speaker 1: try to punch a hole in your radio or you
Speaker 1: do the chair dance, which I'm doing right now. You
Speaker 1: can't tell, but Chris can anyway, stop it, okay. So
Speaker 1: automated cars would not obviously would not fall victim to
Speaker 1: these sort of problems. I mean, they wouldn't be like, hey,
Speaker 1: look at the circuits on that car. Next, Hey, baby,
Speaker 1: I see you like to driff. Yeah, they don't do that,
Speaker 1: um unless it's maybe Kit and he's had a little
Speaker 1: too much anyway, So I don't know how I got
Speaker 1: off in this goofy tangents, probably as I'm hungry. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the the that would make this theoretically would make driving safer,
Speaker 1: assuming that, of course lots of people have these cars.
Speaker 1: You take the human error element out. There are other
Speaker 1: problems that will come into play, and we'll talk about them,
Speaker 1: but theoretically it would mean that traffic would move move
Speaker 1: more smoothly and there'll be fewer accidents. In fact, that
Speaker 1: was a big point that was made recently in a
Speaker 1: discussion that we'll get to about self driving cars and
Speaker 1: how they could in theory cut traffic fatalities in half
Speaker 1: or more. Now, despite the fact that this has been
Speaker 1: in the news a lot lately with a venture we
Speaker 1: will discuss in a minute, this is certainly not a
Speaker 1: new idea by any stretch of the imagination, right. Yeah. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: I came across a great post on Technologizer by Harry McCracken,
Speaker 1: who kind of did a walk down memory lane with
Speaker 1: various stories about predictions for self driving automobiles, the first
Speaker 1: of which dated from nineteen thirty three in Popular Science, sorry,
Speaker 1: popular mechanics. Mechanics. Yeah, a lot of the uh. He
Speaker 1: listed several of them. Um. It seems like they were
Speaker 1: either in Popular Science or popular mechanics. But the first
Speaker 1: was Popular Mechanics. Um. And basically it seemed kind of
Speaker 1: far fetched, at least based on the the UH section. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they were. They were looking at the fact
Speaker 1: that you had garage door openers. He's like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you can automate that, we can get the car
Speaker 1: to back out of the driveway itself and turn itself
Speaker 1: on actually would go the other way. Well, yeah, turns
Speaker 1: off on them back out. No, it depends what all right,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were for we're backing itself out, yes,
Speaker 1: but I mean you could also there are other things
Speaker 1: you could have. Yes, you could have some sort of
Speaker 1: automated sliding platform, yeah, or something like that. So I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it doesn't seem that far fetched, but yeah, it
Speaker 1: probably was a little for the time, especially you know,
Speaker 1: based on the technology they had available to them. And
Speaker 1: then the fifties rolled around and everybody got into that future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the same same sort of futuristic optimism them that
Speaker 1: gave us disney Lands tomorrow Land. That's funny you should
Speaker 1: mention that you had a feeling I was going to
Speaker 1: mention this. Didn't you know this was I just randomly
Speaker 1: decided to say that, right, This is perfectly honest. I
Speaker 1: did not know you were going to mention Disneyland. The
Speaker 1: the long very long term listeners will remember that I
Speaker 1: brought up a specific episode of the Disneyland TV show
Speaker 1: from Oddly that's the same year that some of these
Speaker 1: other articles from Popular Mechanics, Popular Science came out, uh
Speaker 1: with the Magic Highway USA, right right, right, I remember
Speaker 1: you showed you showed me that clip. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: they had they had all kinds of stuff. Electric eyes
Speaker 1: would be embedded in the road so they would light
Speaker 1: up at night and you could drive on them. And
Speaker 1: they'll have automatic signs that will tell you know where
Speaker 1: to go because it knows where you're going. So say
Speaker 1: you're going to uh Lake Tahoe, it will say, oh,
Speaker 1: well you want to turn right seventeen miles up ahead,
Speaker 1: and things like that. They had all sorts of far
Speaker 1: fetched stuff like it could tell you what the traffic
Speaker 1: is in your car, so you know where there's a
Speaker 1: traffic jam up ahead, and your rear view mirror will
Speaker 1: be replaced by a camera. Oh wait, there's last two. Actually,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, but there were there were other things like
Speaker 1: it did get into the whole thing. While you'll insert
Speaker 1: a punch card into your car and it will automatically
Speaker 1: program the route for you, so you so Dad can
Speaker 1: take a conference call on his video monitor in front
Speaker 1: of him, or knocks back five or six scotches. Because
Speaker 1: this is the late fifties, it wasn't that didn't happen
Speaker 1: in the Disney Langue. But they also they had the
Speaker 1: car that breaks up, so mom and the kids go
Speaker 1: in one direction, that goes in the other direction. So it's, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little individual personal transports, kind of like the Jetson's.
Speaker 1: Yeah it wasn't you know that that seems even more
Speaker 1: realistic than the part where you get to the side
Speaker 1: of the building and the whole outside of the building
Speaker 1: lifts you to the level you're supposed to be one
Speaker 1: to that though, because that idea continued in a little
Speaker 1: movie called Minority Report. But we'll get to that. So
Speaker 1: the other the articles you you alluded to in the
Speaker 1: there was one in Popular Science called the car that
Speaker 1: drives itself, and one in Popular Mechanics called this car
Speaker 1: has electric brains. So this was really the time when
Speaker 1: engineers were kind of looking at ways to automate a
Speaker 1: lot of the processes in a car. UM the night
Speaker 1: one was an interesting one because that was a proposal
Speaker 1: to embed along highways radio control boxes. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the one in Popular Science. Yes, yes, so the idea
Speaker 1: would be to use these radio control boxes to guide
Speaker 1: cars through various highway systems. Um. The one in Popular
Speaker 1: Mechanics looked looked at a college professor who had installed
Speaker 1: a or was designing a car that was going to
Speaker 1: use um acoustics and gyroscopes and other stuff like that
Speaker 1: so that the car could drive itself. So these are
Speaker 1: two very different systems. And the first one you're talking
Speaker 1: about creating an infrastructure in which cars would navigate through.
Speaker 1: The other one is looking at focusing all the technology
Speaker 1: in the car itself. Yea, And those are two themes
Speaker 1: that kind of carry through throughout the whole self driving
Speaker 1: car concept. Yeah. I think that these, uh, these two
Speaker 1: articles are actually the start of uh. There probably was
Speaker 1: other stuff too. But I mean this is probably the
Speaker 1: era in which people started taking the idea seriously and
Speaker 1: started looking at realistic possibilities to make this stuff work,
Speaker 1: because they are still talking about these technologies now as
Speaker 1: as methods of handling this. Yeah. Yeah. There was another
Speaker 1: Popular Science article in nineteen sixty seven called how You'll
Speaker 1: Drive the Amazing herb Mobile Mobile verb Mobile, And the
Speaker 1: idea here was that you could manually drive this vehicle
Speaker 1: when you were, say, going on across country trip, but
Speaker 1: then whenever you would enter an urban area that had
Speaker 1: its own infrastructure, you would connect to that and it
Speaker 1: would become almost like a little individual sub why car,
Speaker 1: which again just like Minority Report, Herbie rides again Herbie
Speaker 1: goes bananas. So the the I've said Minority Report a
Speaker 1: couple of times the Minority Reports. Steven Spielberg went to
Speaker 1: Lexus and said, we're doing this movie. It's set in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Tell me what you envisioned cars to be like.
Speaker 1: And although we clearly will be in the singularity by then,
Speaker 1: and thus we will have merged with cars, they went
Speaker 1: ahead and went with the whole non singularity version um
Speaker 1: and and their cars were very much the way the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven article mentioned it was a maglev system
Speaker 1: in the in the minority report that your car would
Speaker 1: connect to and it would even allow you to drive
Speaker 1: up buildings, so you would park your car at your Like,
Speaker 1: let's say you live in a high rise apartment, you
Speaker 1: can actually drive up the side and granted you're not
Speaker 1: doing the driving the cars doing the driving the car
Speaker 1: right move up the side of the building to your
Speaker 1: apartment and you would just get step out of your
Speaker 1: car to your apartment without having to go to an
Speaker 1: elevator or anything like that. Literally door to door type
Speaker 1: stuff makes me think of the The Great Muppet Caper,
Speaker 1: like where are you going the Happiness Hotel? Where are you?
Speaker 1: Where are you staying? Second floor? Oh, I'm sorry, you
Speaker 1: can only take you was first the lobby because he
Speaker 1: didn't have that technology anyway, So we could we could
Speaker 1: talk about the history all day. Yeah, right, So let's
Speaker 1: let's move on a little bit. We'll we'll head up
Speaker 1: to recent years, Like let's go to two thousand before
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Speaker 1: Now DARPA has been the genesis of many amazing technological developments,
Speaker 1: over the years, including a little thing you might know
Speaker 1: called the Internet. Yes, but then they didn't really have
Speaker 1: the d They were sort of d less. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were ARPA back then, but they're DARPA now. And um.
Speaker 1: They issued a challenge back in two thousand two for
Speaker 1: teams to create self driving cars that would be able
Speaker 1: to go through a predetermined route, but they would not
Speaker 1: get the predetermined route until the day of the competition.
Speaker 1: And uh, it was supposed to be both on road
Speaker 1: and off road capabilities, and it was a it was
Speaker 1: a pretty good distance too that they were supposed to go.
Speaker 1: This was the two thousand four Grand Challenge. So in
Speaker 1: two thousand four you had all these teams join uh
Speaker 1: this uh, this Grand Challenge, um, and sadly none of
Speaker 1: them successfully navigated the course. Well, um, that was only
Speaker 1: the first of the Grand Challenges, though they followed it
Speaker 1: up again in two thousand five and again and believe
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven, Yeah, and two thou two thousand
Speaker 1: fives was essentially a new version of the same course.
Speaker 1: And that year was a different story. That year they
Speaker 1: actually had um a couple of teams finish the one
Speaker 1: that one was Stanford's team And in two thousand seven
Speaker 1: and I believe six teams completed the course, Yes, six teams,
Speaker 1: and two thousand seven was different like two thousand four
Speaker 1: and two thousand five was again like the kind of this. Uh.
Speaker 1: It started in um in California and ended in uh
Speaker 1: uh where was it Nevada? I think, yeah, and then Nevada,
Speaker 1: So it was it was a pretty long trip and
Speaker 1: it had mostly there was a little bit of suburban
Speaker 1: navigation they had to go through, but mostly it was
Speaker 1: cross country. The two thousand seven challenge was an urban
Speaker 1: challenge where the vehicles had to navigate an urban landscape
Speaker 1: and there were there were cars already on the road
Speaker 1: that were manned vehicles that had like professional stunt drivers
Speaker 1: driving the cars, and they were in very well protected
Speaker 1: you know, roll cage type scenario kind of vehicles that
Speaker 1: would simulate traffic. So these automated self driving cars were
Speaker 1: supposed to be a navigate through an urban setting and
Speaker 1: be able to go through traffic without having any terrible
Speaker 1: accidents closed course, professional driver do not attempt, right and
Speaker 1: uh yeah. Out of the eleven teams that qualified for
Speaker 1: the actual events, six of them did eventually finish it.
Speaker 1: Uh not all six finished them within the time limit
Speaker 1: that was set, but there were six teams that actually
Speaker 1: managed to get through. The team that placed first that
Speaker 1: year was the Tartan Racing team from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and
Speaker 1: they won two million dollars. Stanford that year came in
Speaker 1: second place, even though technically they finished the course first,
Speaker 1: but they they had more little strikes against them for
Speaker 1: tiny little I think Stanford had a collision. Actually there
Speaker 1: was one. And when I say collision, I mean, oh no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. It wasn't Stanford. I actually have the note here.
Speaker 1: It was Cornell and m I T. They weren't disqualified.
Speaker 1: They gently bumped sides as they both tried to share
Speaker 1: a lane, and they that's when people went up to
Speaker 1: the Cornell and in my two people and said, did
Speaker 1: you not know that a physical object cannot exist within
Speaker 1: the same space and time as a second physical object
Speaker 1: within the same dimension. I'm I'm willing to bet that
Speaker 1: they knew that already. Well didn't he wouldn't know it
Speaker 1: from that, I'm kidding. If you go to Cornell or
Speaker 1: m I T. I know you're smarder than I am.
Speaker 1: Right to me, yes, But as anyone who follows racing, nose,
Speaker 1: trade and paints part of it. Yeah, trading paint. Yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: way to go. If you play burnout you would be
Speaker 1: great at this. Um. Yeah, it was funny. I've got
Speaker 1: this little let me let me read this one little
Speaker 1: bit that came from the press release of the two
Speaker 1: thousand seven Urban Challenge. After strong starts by all the finalists,
Speaker 1: by midden morning, almost half of the field had been
Speaker 1: removed from the race for a variety of reasons. Terra Max,
Speaker 1: a returning crowd favorite, went a ryan a parking lot
Speaker 1: and was stopped moments before entering the old Commissary building.
Speaker 1: It was hungry, apparently, So this would be a bad
Speaker 1: self driving car to be sitting in. If it if
Speaker 1: it disregards the presence of a building, that is a failure.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no please, no no no no no, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh. That kind of leads us to even more
Speaker 1: recent developments. So lots of different engineers are working on
Speaker 1: self driving cars. It's not just in the United States.
Speaker 1: There are teams in Italy and Germany. In fact, I
Speaker 1: was talking to christ before the podcast that a team
Speaker 1: in Germany has created a self driving passat that is
Speaker 1: called the m I g MEG because it stands for
Speaker 1: made in Germany. I still think it could be a
Speaker 1: strike fighter. I'm just wondering why it wouldn't be a
Speaker 1: D for Deutschland. I don't know anyway, So there's a
Speaker 1: will probably be more letters if it were in German.
Speaker 1: There's another big company that's been in the news recently
Speaker 1: for introducing a self driving car program. M hmmm, who
Speaker 1: could that be. It's not Apple, it's not Microsoft, it's Google. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Google made the news. Actually, this was one of those
Speaker 1: things that was interesting. I had heard a rumor and
Speaker 1: I won't I won't explain how, but I had heard
Speaker 1: a rumor that Google was working on something that was
Speaker 1: mind blowing and unlike anything else they had ever done.
Speaker 1: And it turned out it was this. That's that was
Speaker 1: the extent of the rumor I heard. By the way,
Speaker 1: I had no idea what it actually pertained to until
Speaker 1: the news broke that Google, and the news broke by
Speaker 1: Google blogging about it. It's a big surprise, um. But
Speaker 1: Google revealed that they their engineers have been working on
Speaker 1: a new method of self driving cars, and they said
Speaker 1: that their goal was to quote help prevent traffic accidents,
Speaker 1: free up people's time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally
Speaker 1: changing car use. And so far their cars which uh
Speaker 1: it's a fleet of priuses and one al D E
Speaker 1: T T. According to the Times, Uh, they have logged
Speaker 1: over a hundred and forty thousand driving miles. Impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most impressive Jedi yet. Um there. So how do they
Speaker 1: do this? While their cars have video cameras, laser range finders,
Speaker 1: and radar sensors that allow them to to be able
Speaker 1: to see the traffic, to perceive the traffic that happens
Speaker 1: to be around them. As for getting around, they rely
Speaker 1: upon maps that are generated by cars that actually had
Speaker 1: manned There were manned vehicles, Yeah, I should point out that.
Speaker 1: Um that well, of course one unlike the DARPA Urban Challenge, Um,
Speaker 1: there are actual other cars on actual roads. Although the
Speaker 1: I believe the police are aware of where they're going
Speaker 1: and what their plans are. Just to be on the
Speaker 1: safe side. They want to be on the up and up.
Speaker 1: And there is a passenger, There is a human being
Speaker 1: in the car, actually two passengers, yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: US one no, no, no, there's one who's a driver
Speaker 1: who can take over the car if necessary. There's some
Speaker 1: sort of failure. No no, no, no, no no no,
Speaker 1: it's exactly fix it, fix it, fixis That's how That's
Speaker 1: all Fry would say it. Um My wife would love
Speaker 1: that reference, but she doesn't listen to my podcast. The
Speaker 1: the other one was a software engineer. So you had
Speaker 1: two people in the car. Uh that could impact the vehicle.
Speaker 1: Not literally, but they could They could change the course
Speaker 1: of the vehicle if it became necessary. Yes, um, And
Speaker 1: these cars were not low profile. They had very a
Speaker 1: very large weird rack on top of them that contained
Speaker 1: the equipment that allowed them to navigate through traffic. But
Speaker 1: you know, you look at one of these things and
Speaker 1: you're like, something's going on there, because that ain't right,
Speaker 1: you know. I just it looked unlike anything else you
Speaker 1: had ever seen. And I hope there are no low
Speaker 1: overpasses as something Google street view cars have found out
Speaker 1: that antenna it wasn't that well. First of all, they
Speaker 1: were on press which are not very tall vehicles, so
Speaker 1: that helped. But the yeah, it's kind of an interesting
Speaker 1: thing that this was a project that they've been doing
Speaker 1: secretly for a while now. Um. And but again they
Speaker 1: were at least smart enough to let the local police know,
Speaker 1: because you know, you don't want the police to find
Speaker 1: out after the fact. I heard that one of them
Speaker 1: has been involved in an accident, but in that case,
Speaker 1: it was an accident where the vehicle was rear ended
Speaker 1: by another by a manned vehicle. So in that case
Speaker 1: it was not not necessarily the fault of the vehicle.
Speaker 1: But I don't know the full details. It could be
Speaker 1: it could be that the Google vehicle stopped short and
Speaker 1: didn't give the person behind enough time to react. I
Speaker 1: don't know the details. I just I had heard before
Speaker 1: we went into the studio that one of them had
Speaker 1: been involved in a minor fenderbender accident. Um and and
Speaker 1: so without any more information, I can't really say whether
Speaker 1: it was the fault of the driver or the driver
Speaker 1: less car. Um. It's an interesting concept. What what's your
Speaker 1: take on on self driving vehicles? What do you think
Speaker 1: about it? Well, I'm um, it's funny because this goes
Speaker 1: back to a to another related topic that Josh Clark
Speaker 1: and I talked about on Stuff You Should Know way
Speaker 1: back when I used to be the co host of
Speaker 1: that show, like two years plus ago. Now, back when
Speaker 1: our podcast we're all five minutes long, we talked about
Speaker 1: personal rapid transport, and this seems very much like that
Speaker 1: where you you know, you get in your vehicle, you
Speaker 1: tell tell it where it is you want to go,
Speaker 1: and it takes you there. Um. I do think taking
Speaker 1: the human side out is both good and bad, because
Speaker 1: in the good sense, if you can regulate everything, get
Speaker 1: it to the point where everybody is moving at the
Speaker 1: same speed, the vehicles are talking to one another, so
Speaker 1: you can say, oh, car number sixteen way on up
Speaker 1: a head is breaking, I should slow down. In comparison,
Speaker 1: you could theoretically cut down on some of their traffic
Speaker 1: jam problems and uh, you know, potentially cut down on accidents,
Speaker 1: might speed up drive time as as Google said, um,
Speaker 1: you know, perhaps cut down on carbon emissions. But at
Speaker 1: the same time people like to drive. I mean you
Speaker 1: could you could probably talk to Scott and Ben about
Speaker 1: at Car Stuff about that, because Scott's talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about about self driving cars on Car Stuff before.
Speaker 1: I should say so, if you have not heard the
Speaker 1: Car Stuff podcasts, you might want to check those out,
Speaker 1: because I think they did do as a podcast specifically
Speaker 1: about self driving cars, and they talk about all kinds
Speaker 1: of other vehicular stuff too. It's just it's a fascinating podcast.
Speaker 1: But but you know, people like to drive too. And
Speaker 1: then a lot of the comments I've seen that are
Speaker 1: negative about self driving cars are not you know, oh well,
Speaker 1: you know what about foot traffic, which is a legitimate concern.
Speaker 1: Could the cars if the cars talk to each other,
Speaker 1: they're talking to each other, But you know, the lady
Speaker 1: walking or dog and listening to music who's really too
Speaker 1: into her favorite song and not paying attention the car.
Speaker 1: The car is not going to know what she's thinking.
Speaker 1: So you know, you can't really take those kinds of
Speaker 1: unknowns into that. But more than that, I've seen I've
Speaker 1: seen comments by people who are going to say, but
Speaker 1: I like driving my car. Yeah, I think, um, I
Speaker 1: think this will really I think it'll really come into
Speaker 1: play more for things like urban driving. And the reason
Speaker 1: why I think that's because the people who like driving
Speaker 1: their car are not are also the same people who
Speaker 1: say they hate traffic. Um, driving your car and sitting
Speaker 1: in traffic are two different things. When you're driving, you're sitting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think what you're thinking about driving and driving a car,
Speaker 1: you're thinking, Okay, you're on the open road and you
Speaker 1: can you can you know, open it up a little
Speaker 1: bit and you can take in the vista and really
Speaker 1: feel the you know what you're how you're the performance
Speaker 1: of your car is doing that kind of stuff which
Speaker 1: you don't get when you're sitting in traffic that's just
Speaker 1: crawling along on a freeway somewhere. Um So, I think
Speaker 1: if it's one of those systems where you can take
Speaker 1: manual control of your vehicle or you can hand it
Speaker 1: over to an automated system whenever you whenever, that would
Speaker 1: be the most beneficial. I think those stand the best
Speaker 1: chance of success, unless it's mandated, in which case I
Speaker 1: don't see how that works because I mean, you're talking
Speaker 1: about having to tell people you've got to get rid
Speaker 1: of this private property that you legitimately own and replace
Speaker 1: it with something new. The resistance to that would be phenomenal. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I do think unlike those earlier articles from ninety three
Speaker 1: and back at that time, I think we're a lot
Speaker 1: closer technologically to being to having what we need to
Speaker 1: make it happen. It's just going to be difficult to overcome. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, we've already got sensors that will tell you
Speaker 1: if somebody's drifting off when they go to sleep. They
Speaker 1: could tell where you know, whether there's a lane change
Speaker 1: coming up and you're in danger, whether you're leaving your lane,
Speaker 1: things like that. Decent detection, collision detection is well, these
Speaker 1: things are all very useful. But um, one thing that
Speaker 1: I think is very interesting was Palm Paul Marks's take
Speaker 1: on it from the New Scientists, who says that Google
Speaker 1: is not completely altruistic and wanting to implement this technology.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, all right, why don't you explain that and
Speaker 1: then I'll have an explosion and then we can wrap
Speaker 1: this up. Okay, Well, you remember a minute ago when
Speaker 1: I was a few minutes ago now when I was
Speaker 1: talking about the highway Magic Highway US a video and well,
Speaker 1: Dad's going to be taking a conference call on his
Speaker 1: video screen as he's driving. Well, uh, Mr Marks feels
Speaker 1: that Google maybe planning something similar too. And if you're
Speaker 1: not driving, if the danger has taken out of taking
Speaker 1: your eyes off the wheel to take a conference call
Speaker 1: or watch a movie or say click on a few
Speaker 1: AdSense ads, Google would like your eyes on its screen,
Speaker 1: thank you very much, and not on the road. And
Speaker 1: let's just take the stress of driving out so that
Speaker 1: you can be more plugged into the Internet instead. Mr Marks,
Speaker 1: this is Jonathan speaking. Um, do you commonly step outside
Speaker 1: on your porch and shake your fist at the kids
Speaker 1: and yell at them to get off your lawn? Okay,
Speaker 1: well you're already a Mr. Grouchy Pants. We already have
Speaker 1: established this show of the podcast. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: here's here's here's how I look at this. I know
Speaker 1: it's easy to look at Google and say it's a
Speaker 1: mega corporation and therefore anything it does is somewhat suspect.
Speaker 1: I mean, we are automatically have an initial innate distrust
Speaker 1: in these sort of mega corporations, and that's that's a
Speaker 1: healthy thing to have. We should always maintain that sort
Speaker 1: of skepticism and ask questions. However, Google is also a
Speaker 1: company founded by engineers. Engineers, as I have said before,
Speaker 1: often look at the world as a series of problems
Speaker 1: that need to be solved in some way. They're not
Speaker 1: looking at it as a way of making money necessarily,
Speaker 1: although that is always nice. They are looking at it
Speaker 1: as a way of saying, hey, there's this fundamental issue
Speaker 1: that we face day to day that is somehow impacting
Speaker 1: our lives in a negative way. How can we solve
Speaker 1: this so that it no longer has such a negative impact?
Speaker 1: And it really does come from a wish to make
Speaker 1: the world a better place. I really do feel that
Speaker 1: many of the things Google does comes from this desire,
Speaker 1: right that at least the initial idea, the the the
Speaker 1: drive to do it. So to speak to I know,
Speaker 1: I know as soon as I said it, I knew
Speaker 1: you were going to do that anyway. So drive to
Speaker 1: to create these ideas I think comes from a pure intention. Now,
Speaker 1: Google's a company, so it's in their interest to monetize
Speaker 1: these ideas and to make money off of them, generate
Speaker 1: revenue from them. So yeah, ultimately what you get from
Speaker 1: as the product of this idea is going to be
Speaker 1: somewhat sullied by capitalism. It's it has to happen. But
Speaker 1: without the capitalism, you don't have the money to fund
Speaker 1: the idea. So I'm not so quick to jump onto Hey,
Speaker 1: you know why Google is doing this. They're doing it
Speaker 1: so that they can take money from your pockets by
Speaker 1: getting your eyeballs on this advertising. No, I think the
Speaker 1: reason why Google is doing it is they're saying, you know,
Speaker 1: we've got this incredible amount of knowledge and expertise at
Speaker 1: our fingertips, and the world has some serious problems that
Speaker 1: need to be fixed, and we have the chance to
Speaker 1: actually make an impact without making impacts. How about we
Speaker 1: do we do that? That sound good to you guys, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, let's do that. Um So that's my perspective.
Speaker 1: I don't think Google is totally blameless. I don't think
Speaker 1: they're they're staffed by angels. I don't think you hear
Speaker 1: the angelic choir as you walk through the door of
Speaker 1: Google yet because I don't think they've got the speakers working.
Speaker 1: But I don't think that it's all, you know, a
Speaker 1: nefarious plan to get more money. It looks like you
Speaker 1: want to drive to Buffalo. Buffalo is where they make splobs.
Speaker 1: If they have Clippy as your navigator, I will jump
Speaker 1: out of the car. That's Microsoft though Google. Okay, looks
Speaker 1: like you're trying to drive a car. It looks like
Speaker 1: you're going through the drive through. Would you like to
Speaker 1: know how to order a big Mac? Alright, With that
Speaker 1: being said, let's wrap this up. If you guys have
Speaker 1: any comments or questions about self driving cars or anything
Speaker 1: else along those lines, maybe you know, let us know
Speaker 1: what you think. Do you think a self driving car
Speaker 1: is a good idea? Do you think you would never
Speaker 1: get in a self driving car? Or why would you
Speaker 1: be afraid of for your safety? Or is it just
Speaker 1: something you don't think is interesting or good? Self flying cars? Hey,
Speaker 1: there's the Pentagon's working on that, a Humvy self flying car.
Speaker 1: I'm not even joking. You can look at up a
Speaker 1: self flying Humby is one of the projects the Pentagon's
Speaker 1: working on. Now go back and do a Google Sir
Speaker 1: Johnas anyway, and you guys can do it too. Let
Speaker 1: us know what you think. You can pop on our
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W,
Speaker 1: or you can email us. That email address is tech
Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon. If you're
Speaker 1: a tech stuff and be sure to check us out
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Speaker 1: also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash
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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
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