Are self-driving cars solving the wrong problem?

Self-driving tech offered by Tesla, Waymo, and others are impressive but what problem are they solving? Let's discuss if self-driving technologies will finally fix traffic. https://youtu.be/3xG1zYkZpU

Jul 01, 2024

Is the future self-driving?

First San Francisco, then Pheonix, then LA, Atlanta's the next prey for self driving giant Waymo, the most expansive and successful self driving taxi service ran by Google.

Google's not the only company taking up space on the road. Alongside Waymo, you might know about Tesla's "Auto Pilot" technologies, and Elon Musk's army of self-driving and self-destructing Cybertrucks. Many other car companies have similar tech in the works, including, General Motor's Cruise, Ford's Blue Cruise, Mercedes' Drive Pilot, Comma AI, the list goes on and on.

Which begs the question: what will self driving technology do to our cities?

Background

Tech companies and car companies have been trying to crack this nut for the past century, with various improvements year over year, in the name of safety and selling more cars.

To be fair, we've come a long way when it comes to vehicle safety. Up until the last few decades, we've actually been able to decrease vehicle fatalities year over year, due to various improvements brought by car companies and government requirements.

Legal enforcement of crumple zones, seat belts, airbag technologies, smart crash prediction, vehicle awareness technologies, and overall incentives for R&D research have been able to force car companies to make our roads safer, despite the US putting tens of millions more vehicles on the roads every year.

Current State

Prolific figures like this guy (Elon Musk) have touted promises of self driving technology as early as 2017, though software updates in Tesla Electric vehicles, learning how to drive by selling affordable electric cars and compiling data through it's owners.

Even when the vehicle slams into oncoming traffic at 70 mph. Or when the car drives itself onto tram tracks. Or when the vehicle is faced with the frightening challenge of a bollard or a tram track.

There are 6 levels of autonomous vehicle technologies recognized by the US Government, ranging from level 0 being no driving technologies at all, to level 5, full self driving automation, without a steering wheel being present at all.

Tesla's "Autopilot" is only a level 2 software, meaning the driver is liable at all times, however it does have the benefit of being able to be used on any road in the US. Last December, Mercedes achieved legal Level 3 self driving certification limited to only a limited number of roads, primarily freeways and only for speeds under 40 MPH. This system legally permits the user to not be attent, and while self driving, Mercedes is legally liable for any accidents, unless the system formally requests the user to take control, unlike Tesla's Level 2.

Level 4 self driving is being researched by several companies that have been allowed to test their technologies on public roads, through automated robotaxis that will function a lot like taxi's or Ubers, albiet without drivers. The most successful in the US has been Google's Waymo, which operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Pheonix. The runner up is General Motor's Cruise, which also operates in San Francisco, but has not been as successful as Waymo.

Waymo car testing on the Atlanta Connector, June 2024 (by Nathan Davenport)

China is also leading the charge in self driving technologies, with companies XPeng, Huawei, Xiaomi, Nio and Li Auto all offering services competitive to American companies.1

The Grift

I was beginning to drink the Koolaid. Deep into the rabbit-hole of r/selfdrivingcars i fell into, I began lucid dreaming my 2009 Honda starting to park itself at the local Walmart. It was at this moment I realized I had to step back. What's the catch?

Injury Rates

If you ask these companies on the state of self driving vehicles, they'll tell you that their cars are significantly safer than humans.

But to be honest, I trust their press team as much as a standard 23 year old after three Miller High Life's and a quesadilla. Lets look at some real numbers.

If you ask Waymo, they claimed this past December that compared to human benchmarks, they saw an 85% reduction in injury-causing crash rates, and a 57% reduction in police-reported crash rates, both per vehicle miles traveled after 7+million rider-only miles

Cruise also reports 65% fewer collisions after their first 1 million driverless miles as of September 2023.

Tesla consistently claims that "Autopilot is ~10X safer than US average, and ~5X safer than a Tesla with no Autopilot tech enabled," as recently as the beginning of this year.2

But as you can tell, it's extremely difficult to measure self driving safety, as there is no standardization in reporting statistics. I tried to normalize the comparison between the major companies, and found that Waymo performs slightly better than Cruise on average.

In San Fransisco, Waymo saw 0.6 significant injuries out of 18.9 collisions per million miles, a slight improvement over cruises 3 significant injuries out of 23 collisions per million miles.

Statistics the companies compare to for human benchmarks vary widely, seeing ranges of 2.78 - 3.79 injuries out of 17.9 - 64.9 crashes per million miles within the City of San Francisco.

However, Tesla's Autopilot is basically impossible to compare to the robotaxi companies, since the product is a different classification of technology, and operates on completely different types of roads, with Autopilot on freeways across the country and Waymo/Cruise on local streets within San Francisco.

via Journal of Transportation Safety & Security

Tesla claims 43% reductions in crash rates when Autopilot is enabled, but according to a study by Noah Goodall et all from the Journal of Transportation Safety & Security, these metrics do not factor in road types against NHTSA crash data, and when adjusted the improvement is only 10% over normal assist technologies. When correcting for age demographics, there is likely an actual 11% increase in crash rates, due to ages heavily skewing older demographics.3

The real world

While these companies can claim that self-driving is "Significantly safer" than human drivers, there are extreme limitations to these comparisons, and you should not trust the data these companies uses for press releases. These robotaxis operate in very limited, geofenced locations and cannot drive on highways, and have much smaller sample sets to compare to versus human drivers. It is still very early to tell if this technology is actually comparable to human drivers.

Last December, a Waymo vehicle struck a cyclist with minor injuries.4

Last year, a Cruise vehicle ran over a pedestrian, and as a safety measure, dragged them 20 ft at a speed of 7 miles per hour. General Motors was then charged with a 1.5 million penalty for under reporting the severity of this accident, and since Cruise recalled nearly all vehicles and lost its CEO and 25% of it's workforce.5

Tesla's Full Self Driving technology has killed 14 people and injured 49 different people, before being recalled late last year. 6

Not to mention, that Elon Musk has recently decided to remove all LIDAR and radar sensors from its vehicles, and has ignored the technological limitations of using only cameras in non ideal conditions, which self driving systems are notoriously bad at navigating.

Skepticism

Headlines like these should not be taken lightly. According to Pew Research Center in 2022, 73% percent of respondents were either unsure on self-driving technologies or thought self driving was a bad idea.7

But also, based on 2022 data, 116 people die every day in normal car accidents, and over 6,500 people get injured in car related incidents every single day in the United States. 8

But the ultimate question is: how do we differentiate the obvious tech bro grift, from real innovation in technologies that could save lives?

Uber example

The last example of this when it came to transportation was Uber, and the following explosion in ride-share.

Uber single handedly was able to market-share-maxx the competition, by using VC money to make rides ultra cheap and kill confidence in public transportation services, private taxi companies, and grift governments into believing ride share was the future promising a "mobility revolution"

But now, that VC money has dried up, and Uber and Lyft are extremely expensive, and have become the default ride-share options for many people. All while extorting the labor of dumb idiots like myself and putting irreversible miles of damage on their cars.

Ride-share is definitely useful, especially in places that have limited or no public transportation and no local taxicab services. The grift was that ride-share companies exploit their workers, overcharge for their service, and add tens of thousands of cars to our roads every day.

AV's sound extremely familiar, promising a "mobility revolution" and similar grifting slogans. Self driving technologies, and especially robo-taxi companies, are competing with ride share and public transportation, and will not make traffic better.

Automation of jobs

Another massive concern for self driving is the ongoing conversation of job automation. A massive subsection of the American economy is dependent on transportation related industries, including freight, ride-hailing, and delivery services.

Many are concerned about the impact automation will have on all jobs, not just transportation industries. Fast food companies are replacing cashiers with touchscreen kiosks. Grocery stores are replacing baggers with self checkout lanes. Now AI is challenging all sorts of fields including illustration, design, writing, video editing, software engineering. Overall, the United States Government's Accountability Office estimates that 9% to 47% of current jobs will be automated in the future.9

The impeding threat of automation is making a lot of people extremely worried about job security. Especially when the wealthiest, 1% members of our society are making more than ever before. Efforts to unionize for workers rights and fair wages are continuing to grow across industries in response. Recently, the United Auto Workers Union won a historic battle in Chattanooga, Tennessee, winning the union vote at the Volkswagen plant in hope of correcting labor rights violations and achieving better wages.

Global Policy Solutions estimates that more than four million jobs will be lost if we rapidly transition to self driving vehicles. This doesn't bode well for many who make their living off freight, trucking, ride-hailing, delivery, and more. A lot of people are worried, as capitalism continues to do what it does best.10

Sprawl

These self driving vehicles will be very limited to those who have access to technology, to those who are technology literate, and to those who can literally afford to pay the cost of a personal taxi to take them from place to place.

Its a continued effort of the existing problem of car dependent suburban sprawl, and the same problem behind ride-share companies like Uber. Self driving companies are promising a mobility revolution, but really it's just a continuation of car dependency.

Car dependency exists to literally make cities and urbanized areas more spread apart to make room for road infrastructure and increase the range needed for garbage, sewage, fire, and transportation services. This makes it harder and harder for cities to keep a sustainable tax base without further expansion to create funding.

Racial Bias

Additionally, as we've seen with existing facial recognition and AI technologies, pedestrian detection technologies have been shown to have a bias against people with darker skin tones and children.

Cornell University researchers found through testing over 8,000 images, pedestrian detection accuracy for adults was almost 20% higher than it was for children, and just over 7.5% more accurate for light-skinned pedestrians compared to their darker-skinned counterparts.11

What this means is that while self-driving vehicle companies claim increased safety metrics against human drivers, there is a guaranteed bias against certain types of pedestrians outside the vehicles.

Reality

Self driving technology could do wonderful things to improve vehicle safety, but the real thing we have to confront is the all or nothing scenario being pushed. I think the real grift is that we are being told we have to min max the whole system, when really, self-driving is another tool that can be applied in certain scenarios.

Browsing the magnificent world of the world wide web, I came across an exciting article by Bloomberg CityLab, pitting a Manhattan Institute analyst against several San Francisco activists on the implications of self driving vehicles.

The advocate argued that cities could be "transformed" by self driving technologies. They envision cities that would forego the needs of privately owned vehicles, parking infrastructure, and public transportation services, served completely by self driving vehicles along the roadway corridors. Cities could reuse this space for pickup and dropoff points, and could make city streets much safer in the process.

Critics argued that self driving vehicles would simply just add more cars to the roads, and cities would just not be transformed by self driving technologies. Cars are fundamentally incompatible with cities, and envisioning a future city based around autonomous cars would not look different than now. They say, "AV's fail in all the sam ways normal cars do, but AV's also fail in new ways."12

Concluding Thoughts

The real issue at hand is, self driving can be wonderful in suburban and rural areas, helping with long distance drives that aren't served by rail, and improving safety in areas that can't be served by public transit. But ultimately, cars are fundamentally incompatible with cities, and self driving technology should be used to supplement efficient transportation systems outside of dense, urban areas.

Self driving can very much be a transformative technology. But self driving technologies aren’t going to fix traffic in urban areas - and that's the true grift here. Self driving will be wonderful for trips that absolutely need to be made by car, such as long distance interstate trips that aren’t served by better modes and driving in suburban and rural areas that aren't able to support great public transportation. However, self driving in personal vehicles for in city trips, just will never mesh with dense urban environments.

Instead, self driving technologies used within public transportation services is what we should be focusing on: dense urban environments that can support high capacity public transportation, with environmentally friendly, commuter public transportation systems to connect urban and exurban areas.

Ultimately, self driving is a continuation of the car brain status quo we exist in here in America, in a constant state of car dependency. These companies are spending billions of dollars trying to create a technology that will make traffic more enjoyable to sit in, without stepping back and just realizing the pit we're stuck in, cannot be engineered out of.