Car talk
At MIT, federal safety chief discusses future of automated driving.
Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office
February Ten, two thousand sixteen
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Discussions of self-driving vehicles are often accompanied by very certain predictions: Visions of the future include entire networks of automated cars seamlessly zipping around metropolitan areas, securely and efficiently, with every person inwards them a passive, hands-off passenger.
On Tuesday at MIT, the U.S. government’s chief auto safety official suggested a more restrained view, suggesting that technology could provide significant fresh safeguards for cars, while observing that it is too soon to say precisely what form vehicular automation will eventually take.
“Right now, we indeed don’t know what the future is,” said Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), during a public forum at the Institute.
“There’s this picture we’ll be taking naps and doing crossword puzzles” while in cars, Rosekind noted, adding that the more instant question is what it would take to make such a script possible. “Can we get there?” he asked.
In his remarks, Rosekind voiced enthusiasm for the possibility of automation-based safety improvements and said that NHTSA is attempting to expedite the process through which more testing of automation takes place. The agency aims to accomplish within six months a policy document through which it can give guidance to automakers and technology companies, and outline a path forward for more experimentation on roads.
“I think we need a enormous amount of data,” he said.
The government’s principal purpose while examining all of this, Rosekind emphasized, is safety.
“It’s all about the human,” Rosekind said. “The human has to be front and center.”
The forum, “The Present and Future of Automated Driving: Technology, Policy, and the Human Factor,” drew an audience of over two hundred fifty people to MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. The event was hosted by the MIT AgeLab. Rosekind participated in a conversation with Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT AgeLab and associate director of the Fresh England University Transportation Center, of which MIT is a part.
In his remarks, Rosekind highlighted the large number of auto fatalities in the U.S: There were 32,675 such deaths in 2014. That is actually down substantially — about twenty percent — over the last decade. And yet, Rosekind said, preliminary data indicate the figure may leap back up by nine percent for 2015, perhaps partly because gas prices have been lower and the volume of vehicles on the road may have thus enlargened.
Rosekind noted that safety technologies, especially seatbelts and airbags, have saved large numbers of lives in latest decades, but automation devices held significant promise.
“The question is how we commence ravaging on better and better technologies,” he said.
One of the keys to automated safety, he stressed, was connectivity: making sure vehicles are communicating with each other on the road.
“Connected vehicles give you further levels of safety that you can’t get with independent autonomous vehicles,” Rosekind said. Such vehicle-to-vehicle communication, he explained, could help reduce accidents at intersections and in all kinds of screenplays where driver vision is normally limited.
On the other mitt, Rosekind noted, in response to an audience question, the development of communication among all autos on the road would either require massive retrofitting among current autos or take a long time to phase in: “If you had flawless, connected autonomous vehicles on the road tomorrow, it would still take twenty to thirty years to turn over the fleet.”
In response to further questions from the audience, Rosekind acknowledged that issues about data privacy and security from hackers were among the hurdles that have to be cleared in order for automation to hop forward.
“Humans aren’t going to trust the vehicles unless you address those [issues],” he suggested.
And Rosekind took a neutral stance on one of the main issues involving self-driving cars: whether they could be totally autonomous, which is the direction Google has been moving in, or whether more incremental versions of vehicle automation will take hold, which is what some automakers believe.
“Folks tend to separate this into two views,” Rosekind agreed, emphasizing again that the degree of automation was still very much to be determined: “I don’t think we know yet.”