Robot Cars in California

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're in California and you need a ride, so you
use the Lift app. A few minutes later, a car
pulls up to take you to your destination. Only there's
one strange thing going on. There's no driver. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and this is Tech Stuff Daily. The car service
company Lift recently received the go ahead from the California

(00:25):
Department of Motor Vehicles to test driverless cars on California roads.
The company joins several others on a long list of
groups that are in various stages of testing autonomous vehicles
on California highways. In fact, as of the recording of
this episode, there are at least forty five companies that
have this permission. That list has some recognizable names on it.

(00:47):
There's some big names in the automotive industry like Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes, Ford,
and BMW. There then there are younger car companies that
aim to disrupt the industry like Tesla Motors and Faraday
and Future in operted. There are also some huge names
in the tech space that earned their reputation in other
areas of tech, such as Samsung Electronics in Nvidia and Apple.

(01:09):
Google is in there too, in the form of weay Mo,
which is the branch of Alphabet, Google's parent company that
focuses on autonomous vehicles. Lift plans on working with some
of these entities while simultaneously developing its own autonomous vehicle technologies.
Autonomous vehicles remain a controversial subject for several reasons, not
all of them technological. First, you have the understandable concerns

(01:32):
of a population that hasn't yet come to trust a
machine to operate a vehicle the way a human would.
It takes a certain level of let's call it faith
to sit back and let a car drive itself while
you have no control over the situation. And even if
you know that cars are able to monitor conditions all
around a vehicle consistently and constantly, unlike a human being

(01:52):
who must focus in one direction at any given time,
it's still a big trust exercise to sit in the
back seat. After all, we're all familiar with technology that
fails to work the way it's supposed to, whether it's
the infamous Blue Screen of death or a washing machine
that was working just fine yesterday but now refuses to drain.

(02:12):
We know tech isn't necessarily perfect. A well designed autonomous
vehicle would be able to alert humans to potential problems
well before they become a real issue, returning to home
base for maintenance and repair. But we all know there
will be cases where that fails to happen. Then there's
the question of who is to be held responsible should
an autonomous vehicle cause an accident. Should it be the

(02:34):
company operating the vehicle, the one that made the software,
the one that manufactured the car. There may be many
parties involved depending upon the situation, and establishing accountability is
still an open question. Once you do, how do you
find the entity at fault? If a driverless car, for example,
fails to yield before making a turn and causes an accident,

(02:56):
how do you penalize the responsible party? Do you take
away the cars license to drive itself? And while driverless
algorithms are improving with every mile of research, machines still
aren't as good at reacting to unusual situations as humans are.
For example, if you're driving down the road and a
metal ladder falls off a truck in front of you,
you know that's the potential hazard and you can try

(03:17):
to avoid it. If the truck in front of you
drops a pillow, you know that colliding with the pillow,
while not ideal, isn't likely to cause you any harm.
But a car controlled by a computer may not be
able to make these distinctions, and so may react in
a way that actually creates more risk rather than avoids it.
Then there's the job's factor. Lots of people drive for

(03:38):
Lift in order to earn extra cash. A few may
rely upon it as their primary source of income. But
what happens when Lifts starts rolling out driverless vehicles. Lift
drivers may find themselves in competition with robots. Worse, the
company may see their jobs as being redundant, and layoffs
could follow. There will still be a need for humans
it lifts operations. There will likely be maintenance scarages that

(04:00):
will keep the cars running and in good working order.
But it's not like the skill sets of driver and
mechanic or a computer scientists are all transferable. Earlier in
twenty seventeen, Goldman Sacks estimated that autonomous cars might cost
as many as twenty five thousand driving jobs a month.
Their estimates mostly covered the professional truck driving industry. In fact,
the reports suggested that truck drivers will see the impact

(04:22):
no pun intended of driverless cars more than taxi drivers
or bus drivers. When you look at the numbers, you
understand why in the United States there are about four
million driver jobs. Three point one million of those are
truck drivers. According to Goldman Sacks, that's about two percent
of the overall workforce in the United States. Unlike what

(04:42):
you might expect given the headlines, Goldman Sacks thinks we're
still several years away from seeing autonomous vehicles making up
a substantial percentage of car sales. The report suggests that
it won't be until twenty twenty five to twenty thirty
that we see autonomous cars make up of overall car sales.
There's also a question of who will be buying those vehicles.

(05:02):
Autonomous driving tech isn't cheap, though perhaps with mass manufacturing,
we might see prices fall within the purchasing power of
the average car buyer. Some analysts believe we're more likely
to see companies like Lift purchase fleets of driverless cars.
This could lead to an era in which fewer people
will own a personal vehicle instead will rely more heavily

(05:23):
on car services to arrange rides on demand. Imagine a
world where you don't need to worry about parking or
car payments or insurance and other nuisances that a company
owning a car on the flip side, you wouldn't be
able to jump into the driver's seat and driver pleasure.
It seems like it's just a matter of time before
we have these driverless cars escorting us around dense urban centers.

(05:44):
We may never see robot cars takeover in more remote
rural areas. So if you do love driving, consider moving
out to the country to learn more about autonomous cars,
the effects automation will have on the economy, and everything
else that has to do with technology. Subscribe to The
Tech Stuff podcast. I published new episodes every Wednesday and Friday,
and explore technology much more thoroughly Over there. I'll see

(06:06):
you again soon