Imagine waking up from a nap in a near-future time, finding yourself behind the wheel of your car, careening at 65 miles per hour just a few feet behind the bumper of the automobile ahead of yours.
Automatic Driving: Automobility
Naturally, you stomp on the brake, but nothing happens! Your car is in control, and fortunately for you — and about a dozen other dozing motorists — it’s a better driver. Had your brakes activated, you would have wiped out the car tucked just a few feet behind yours, and the one behind it, and so on. You are traveling in a platoon, a group of cars banded closely together, clicked into autopilot, zooming to your destination, temporarily sharing space with other cars in a highly congested corridor. The vehicles steer themselves by following a guidance signal transmitted from sensors in the cars. Other sensors and microprocessors and communication gear aboard each car create invisible couplers, enabling the group to pack together bumper to bumper. It’s like riding in a private compartment aboard a train. But when it’s time for you to exit the freeway, the car takes you off the ramp and you take the wheel again to make your way independently to home or office, or maybe to pick up your daughter after her weekend camping trip.
In traffic-choked regions like the L.A. basin, such automatic driving will first appear probably around 2010. It will herald the second revolution in personal transportation: liberation from traffic and travel ills by automobiles that drive themselves.
It’s a notion that only technologists can love — one that environmentalists and ban — the-buggy extremists may loathe — that we develop better automobiles to treat the illnesses that automobiles themselves engender. According to the argument for intelligent vehicles and highways to accommodate them, cars aren’t to blame for the congestion on our urban expressways. The real problem is that we human drivers simply cannot operate our autos well enough. Self-piloting ones will run with far greater precision.
Automatic driving will close up the average 100-foot gap that freeway cruisers keep between vehicles as a cushion for human reaction times. Such measures increase highway capacity promising to unclog traffic congestion. Cars under autopilot will motor more efficiently, too, spewing less pollution. They’ll make roads safer and more orderly, eliminating human misjudgments that cause most accidents. And the systems will remove the remaining drudgery from driving, freeing motorists to use travel time for fun or profit. “IVHS (Intelligent Vehicle and Highway Systems) will ultimately rewrite the whole book on transportation, on land use, on the choices people make about where they work and where they live,” says John Vostrez, director of research and technology for IVHS America, the Washington-based transportation advisory group that unites politicians, inventors, business executives, and scientists. But to reach its full potential, automatic driving requires changes, concessions, and compromises from transportation consumers and creators alike. Auto companies must work cooperatively on compatible communicating equipment that will allow all cars on the road to operate in tight synchrony. Governments must provide the electronic infrastructure for the roads they own and operate. This, in turn, will require a lot more care and attention than many crumbling highways now receive. Eventually, individuals will have to acquire new driving habits, earning to trust vehicles that know better than to always do what we want them to. People will have to make personal investments too, purchasing autos specially outfitted to run in coordinated, self-directing traffic systems. IVHS America estimates that the creation and deployment of intelligent vehicles and high-way systems in the United States will require nearly $200 billion over 20 years. Most of that will be folded into the prices people pay for automobiles.
The spending is just beginning. The sweeping 1991 U.S. Transportation Act allocated about $660 million over six years for IVHS, while across the Atlantic, the Prometheus IVHS project has the underwriting of virtually the entire European auto industry. Also, industry and government partnerships are conducting traffic-automation tests in Japan. “The whole thing depends on whether society decides that we will spend some of our resources to develop and deploy these technologies,” Vostrez says.
Meanwhile, the pace of technological discoveries and developments threatens to leave us behind. The machine in your driveway today relies entirely on your sight, hearing, proprioception, and kinesthesia for guidance, and on your limbs for control. But if it features antilock brakes or traction control, as many do, your car is already taking over. Eventually, it will assume total control through devices that monitor such variables as road speed, turning angle, the amount of gas pouring into the engine, and the level of braking being applied. Radar will detect the position and even compute the speed of vehicles on the road around you. As your car “sees” approaching obstacles, as it “senses” the roughness of the pavement and “converses” with street-side information posts and even with other vehicles, its microprocessor brain will activate electromechanical motors that control steering, accelerating, slowing, and cruising. On priority roadways — urban freeways, tunnels, and bridges — your car’s own decision making might be superseded by commands from a traffic monitoring center that integrates vehicles in a coordinated traffic pattern, like air-traffic control. “It will be a modern version of the highway, where a lot of the functions of the driver will be controlled by the highway itself,” says Randolph Hall, a manager for California’s Partnership for Advanced Transit and Highways.
Called PATH, the organization rides the forefront of automatic driving. When the carpool lane of Interstate 15 near San Diego closes after rush hour, PATH researchers test four Ford cars electronically tied into a single file — so far at speeds up to 75 miles per hour. PATH researchers also teamed with the company IMRA America and are working on automatic steering. A magnetometer beneath the car reads the field created by a trail of magnets embedded along the center of the lane. PATH aims to combine the two capabilities to demonstrate platooning on a real freeway by 2001.
The advent of automatic driving comes as a happy confluence of technology and societal need. By 1990, America brimmed with 143 million registered cars, about one automobile for every two residents, cites the Federal Highway Administration (FHA). That same year, the average American male spent more than 16,500 miles on the road, nearly 20 percent more than the 14,000 miles he drove in 1983, says the FHA Female drivers increased their highway usage nearly 50 percent during the same period, averaging about 9,543 miles annually by 1990. The resulting traffic congestion, along with the hazards and pollution it breeds, cries out for a solution. IVHS America — which serves as a coordinating body, encouraging industry and government to work together toward improving land transportation through a wide range of technologies — estimates that each commuter experiencing a ten-minute daily delay sacrifices up to $1,200 annually in lost time and extra fuel. The U.S. government’s General Accounting Office prices the annual productivity loss from traffic congestion at about $100 billion nationwide. It can only get worse: Since the 1960s, the number of vehicles registered in the States has grown faster than the population, according to FHA figures. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates traffic accidents cost U.S. consumers $130 billion annually.
Better technology may be the only alternative to eventual limits and restrictions on motor travel. A 1991 report to the Senate Subcommittee on Transportation by the General Accounting Office found that automated highway systems could increase road capacity by as much as 300 percent “by allowing vehicles to travel closer together at higher speeds.” Projections by PATH find that the capacity of a freeway lane could increase to 6,000 cars per hour from the current average of about 2,200.
Even better, those 6,000 cars would drive themselves so well that traffic would actually move, not lurch and stop and crawl and stall. “You can minimize stream turbulence in congested traffic,” says PATH director Don Orne. Stream turbulence starts when brake lights appear. As following drivers react, a shock wave passes through traffic, sometimes stopping cars that are far behind the original incident.
Human reaction — especially over-and under-reaction — is the bogeyman of auto motion. “The majority of accidents are due to errors by the driver,” says Hall. Computers are simply less error prone, providing consistency and precision. Automatic driving can also place vehicles in traffic schemes that are inherently less hazardous. Take a platoon. “If the vehicles are very close together and their velocities are the same, a collision would have a very minor impact,” says Hall. It could probably be absorbed by heftier bumpers, letting the caravaning autos continue their journey, he says.
What’s more, the sensors and microprocessors used for automatic driving could also power sophisticated warning devices to help when drivers operate their cars in manual mode. In fact, most sensing systems will start out as mere driver aids until they’re proven reliable enough for actual vehicle control. Collision-avoidance radar from Ford Motor Company will appear first as a vision-enhancement device. In poor visibility, it may project simplified icons onto a windshield in a head-up display, over-laying the position of other vehicles and hazardous obstacles. “For the moment, we’re not taking control of the vehicle, but the day that it becomes acceptable to the driving community, the system will be able to do so very accurately,” says Eduardo Peralta, manager of the research program.
“We need to go up the development stairway a step at a time; that’s the whole history of the automotive industry,” says Robert Ervin, codirector of the University of Michigan’s IVHS program. The process begins with autonomous, free-standing safety and convenience features that show up first in high-priced autos and then trickle down as they demonstrate their worth. Highly coordinated functions like platooning won’t become widespread for at least 20 years, predicts PATH director Don Orne. Others are more cautious. Joseph M. Sussman, professor of engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former distinguished university scholar with IVHS America, doesn’t expect such capabilities to reach the cars of average motorists for another 25 to 30 years. “There’s a lot of technical work that needs to be done,” not to mention the engineering, education, and public-policy changes, Sussman says.
The evolution of thinking cars began when antilock brakes appeared in the mid 1980s, followed by traction control. Both countermand the command of the driver in order to keep tires rolling under control. An antilock brake system, or ABS, using a series of rapid pulses, automatically reduces brake pressure when it determines that a wheel is about to lock during hard stopping — a condition that would cause it to slide out of control. Traction control piggybacks onto ABS to prevent spin-outs during acceleration. The system available on Infiniti 045 models borrows the car’s ABS sensors to detect when a wheel is spinning too fast. It then applies selective brake pressure to keep an errant wheel under control. At the same time, the computer may reduce the amount of gas going into the engine, even though the driver is trying to pour it on all at once. Not only does the system provide better starts at stoplights, it can assure stability during risky maneuvers like passing a truck in rain or snow.
Engineering, manufacturing, and operational experience from one mile-stone system — antilock brakes — roll into another, traction control. They even share some of the same hardware and software. “One of the reasons this technology is so appealing to me is that it’s relatively inexpensive” once the fundamental building blocks are in place, says Gene Farber, who directs IVHS strategy and planning for Ford. With enough sensors, actuators and processing power on board, adding control features becomes primarily an exercise in computer programming.
Two key building blocks yet to come are collision-avoidance radar and integrated power-train control. Elements of each are arriving fast. Integrated power-train control eliminates the mechanical linkage that currently connects the gas pedal to the engine. In the future, the accelerator will be a mere electronic input device, registering your intention by sending impulses to a control computer much the way your kid makes Mario jump and run with a Nintendo joystick. A significant first step in that direction is the electronically controlled accelerator on the new BMW 750il luxury sedan. Its gas pedal operates a potentiometer, like a radio volume control. A simple wire connects it to the computerized engine-management system.
Such drive-by-wire arrangements make it easier to add fully automatic speed control because they give a computer full charge over the physical mechanisms that govern the engine. Today’s cruise-control devices share the engine with the gas pedal, and the driver’s foot has priority. That would never do in a platoon, where speed would have to be adjusted precisely, automatically, to keep each member in synch with the group. With drive-by-wire, the computer could turn off the gas pedal when appropriate.
What’s more, a processor between driver and engine can mollify the pedal so that the engine operates at peak efficiency all the time. “A driver doesn’t know exactly how to use his toe to optimize fuel consumption and minimize emissions,” says Ralph Colello, head of the automotive practice of management consultants at Arthur D. Little. With fully integrated power-train control, he says, “the computer would decide how much fuel to add and how quickly to add it.”
As a first step toward collision-avoidance radar, intelligent or adaptive cruise control should begin appearing on cars by about 1995. A prototype adaptive cruise system on a Cadillac Seville running around the General Motors Technical Center near Detroit uses a radar-like device to gauge the distance to the car ahead. A controller then constantly adjusts the car’s speed to maintain a safe following distance, adapting to faster speeds by staying farther back. If the leading vehicle should slow suddenly, GM’s system automatically applies the brakes while at the same time sounding an alert to let the driver know that additional action is needed.
A similar intelligent cruise system being developed by Mercedes-Benz uses an infrared distance sensor. “There’s a Mercedes test car on the road every day in which the driver sits there with arms folded while the car drives itself,” Dieter Zetsche, the new head of Mercedes-Benz research and development in Germany, said recently. A production Mercedes with intelligent cruise control is possible by 1994 (probably for the 1995 model year). In Japan, Nissan is working on a range finder that reads the reflections of lasers. Already Japanese truckers can buy a version that warns them if they’re closing too fast. And the 2,400 buses of Greyhound Lines are being equipped with radar warning systems from VORAD Safety Systems of San Diego. These devices are all stepping stones to fuller-functioning collision avoidance like the system under development at Ford, which uses multimode radar that adapts to changing traffic conditions. The system may stare at faraway obstacles; it may slew — slowly scan — to get a better read on objects at intermediate range and then rapidly scan threats nearer the vehicle. “It has to recognize a tree beside the road from a car on the road,” says Eduardo Peralta, a former weapons engineer who transferred from Ford Aerospace to the car business in 1987. The device differentiates between two side-by-side vehicles at 500 yards, resolution that would have required a ten-foot diameter antenna until Ford developed an alternative barely five inches across. “This will be the smartest system on the car,” says Peralta, his pride subdued but apparent.
Other technologies will play significant supporting roles. Vehicle navigation can tell a car where it is and how to get to where it’s going, typically by combining an external positioning technology, like satellite tracking, with on-board dead-reckoning that charts the car’s progress on computerized maps. In the TravTek test project now underway in Orlando, video screens in 100 Oldsmobile Toronados display traffic information as well as maps directing drivers to their destinations. Future nav systems could be linked to automatic vehicle controls to allow a car to guide itself. With roadside communication beacons to transmit information like speed limits and turn restrictions, a properly equipped automobile could conceivably freewheel from driveway to, say, a restaurant punched into the nav system from its own Yellow Pages directory. The most challenging barrier to roadway automation is not scientific knowhow, but nagging societal issues. Pollution remains a big concern. There’s little doubt that individual cars will emit less pollutants once consistent, computerized control nullifies erratic and inefficient driving. Advocates hope that even if travel volume increases, overall emissions will decrease as automatic driving cuts out the stop-and-go traffic in which engines are least efficient. “There may be pollution benefits, but those benefits are not proven,” concedes PATH’s Hall. At the same time, development of alternative engines and fuels, electric cars, and even better gasoline engines may ameliorate emissions.
Another concern holding up the systems is product liability. Auto makers fear being nagged into bankruptcy by claims for equipment failures or, even worse, perceived equipment failures in automobiles outfitted for automatic driving. “Our substantial concern is about its misuse,” says Farber. According to Vostrez, we need to legislatively improve the environment for developing these systems. “We must recognize that especially during the early development stage there will be some risk,” he says. “Society must agree to share it.”
Yet probably the greatest concern among IVHS advocates is how to make room for drivers once cars no longer need them. The inevitability of human presence means that automated systems must be excruciatingly simple to operate. They must allow for safe, easy transitions between manual and automatic modes. And they cannot distract or overload operators. That’s where computer-processing power can be used to great advantage. For instance, in Ford’s collision-avoidance system, “all the processing is done internally, within the radar, to keep the driver from being distracted by needless information. Only the threats are presented to the driver,” Peralta says.
He worries about price tags, too. At introduction around year 2000, Ford’s radar won’t exceed $1,200, the sum motorists already pay for power moonroofs. Fact is, the auto makers are pretty consistent in turning marvelously complex and concatenated machinery, both electronic and mechanical, into products for the masses. After a century competing in consumer markets, they’ve learned that the success of such concepts as automatic driving ultimately hinges on popular acceptance.
At the same time, we motorists have demonstrated an eagerness for equipment that makes driving more comfortable and convenient, from electric starters and automatic transmissions to air conditioners and even car radios. Operator skill improves with successive refinements. “When I was a kid, driving was so all-consuming that you never thought of bringing food or drink into the car,” says Jerry Palmer, a GM future thinker and Design Center executive. Automatic driving will make possible a game of chess, a chapter of War and Peace, even a nap. “Your relationship with your vehicle will be such that you’ll actually look forward to a long journey,” Palmer predicts.
Automatic driving will improve relationships among vehicles, relieve crowding, reduce hazards, all the while allowing people to amass their beloved automobiles. To that end, careful rethinking and reorganizing of transportation policy should begin today, before it’s too late. “When you look at the speed at which the technology is evolving,” warns Vostrez, “it may arrive a lot faster than we anticipate.”
As you may have noticed, this article from Omni Magazine (a much beloved “science sister” in the Penthouse Publishing Group) hit the streets 20 years ago this past April. It would be worth noting that “hit the streets” accurately describes how magazines reached the public back then, because 1993 was not a big year for digital publications. Interestingly, Whitney Houston (died in 2012) had the top song with “I Will Always Love You” in that year, which may well describe how we’ll all feel when we get rid of our last car that cannot drive itself. Just this past January one of our Penthouse reporters took the last photograph in our 2023 Pet of the Year coverage, as she travelled the Las Vegas Strip behind a cab with no driver. Should you wish to find interesting statistics on the cars today, the insurance industry might provide at least a potentially less biased overview. … Bottom line, enjoy you time behind the wheel while you can — while some of us remember the days when our dates could slide across the front seat so we could hug with one arm while we drove. (Yeah, yeah. Maybe not so safe, but super fun.)
