The problem you must solve is:
1. Refer to this report about the future of cars
2. In your own words, and in complete sentences, answer the following questions:
a. How many states considered or are considering legislation to allow self- driving cars?
b. Approximately how many traffic fatalities were there in total in 1973? In2010? How many fatalities were there per 100 million miles traveled in each of those years?
In which age groups did the percentage of licensed drivers increase between 1982 and 2012? Approximately how many percentage points did each age group increase?
c. In which year were motor vehicle fatalities the highest?
3. Describe anything that makes the graphs hard to read. What would you do differently?
4. State 3 additional pieces of information that you can read from these data displays.
**Don’t just list your answers! Remember to show and describe your work.
Discuss how you got your answers from each graph or chart. For example: Was
there a legend to follow? A scale you had to read and convert? How did you
identify your answer from the chart.
Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc.
www.cqresearcher.com
Future of Cars
Are Americans ready for self-driving vehicles?
C
ars that drive themselves, long a staple of science
fiction, could be in auto showrooms in the next
few years. Automakers and researchers around the
world are testing and refining technologies that
allow a car to know where it is going and to communicate with
other vehicles. Special sensors and software make the breakthroughs possible. Already, cars are selling with automated features designed to keep them in the correct lane, brake to avoid
collisions and park themselves. Technology giant Google, which
has tested vehicles with self-driving features on a half-million
Google’s driverless electric car has no steering wheel,
accelerator or brake pedal and reaches a top speed of
25 mph. Although the prototype, unveiled on May 27,
is far from ready for consumers, self-driving cars
could begin appearing in auto showrooms
within a few years.
miles of roads, recently demonstrated a car with no steering
wheel, accelerator or brake pedal. It remains unclear, however,
how safe super-smart cars would be, how they would affect traffic
congestion, how consumers and the nation would pay for the cars
and the supporting infrastructure they would need and whether
Americans will accept such a radical change in their relationship
I
N
with automobiles.
THIS REPORT
S
I
D
E
CQ Researcher • July 25, 2014 • www.cqresearcher.com
Volume 24, Number 27 • Pages 625-648
THE ISSUES ………………..627
BACKGROUND …………….634
CHRONOLOGY …………….635
CURRENT SITUATION ……..640
AT ISSUE……………………641
OUTLOOK ………………….644
RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR
EXCELLENCE ◆ AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………….646
THE NEXT STEP …………..647
FUTURE OF CARS
THE ISSUES
627
• Will new technologies
improve safety?
• Will new technologies
reduce congestion?
• Will consumers buy automated cars?
SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS
628
629
Traffic Fatalities Hit FiveDecade Low
Deadly accidents have decreased about 40 percent
since 1972.
632
Fewer Teens, Young Adults
Are Driving
Only 41 percent of American
teenagers had a driver’s license in 2012.
BACKGROUND
634
636
638
8,000 Cars to 8 Million
Beginning in 1908, Henry
Ford’s Model T and assembly
lines made cars widely affordable.
Nation Transformed
Americans embraced the
freedom cars gave, despite
congestion and pollution.
Improved Technology
Self-driving cars have moved
from science fiction to nearreality.
635
Chronology
Key events since 1908.
636
Laser Is Key to
Self-Driving Cars
Multiple technologies let
vehicle study its environment.
638
When Cars Are Smarter,
Roads Can Be Smarter, Too
“Everything’s changed but
our highways.”
CURRENT SITUATION
640
643
644
Regulatory Action
State and federal policy
makers are just beginning to
deal with changing automobile technology.
641
At Issue:
Should states replace the
gas tax with a tax on miles
traveled?
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Highway Funding
The U.S. system for financing
roads and bridges is under
stress.
645
For More Information
Organizations to contact.
OUTLOOK
646
Bibliography
Selected sources used.
Ubiquitous Taxis
Automated cars may someday
show up only when consumers need them.
647
The Next Step
Additional articles.
647
Citing CQ Researcher
Sample bibliography formats.
Cover: Google
626
Self-Driving Cars Allowed
in Four States, D.C.
Other states are considering
such laws.
CQ Researcher
July 25, 2014
Volume 24, Number 27
MANAGING EDITOR: Thomas J. Billitteri
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Barbara Mantel, Tom Price, Jennifer Weeks
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Future of Cars
BY DAVID HOSANSKY
THE ISSUES
“It’s a golden age for innovation in automobiles,”
says Gary Silberg, an autohe car that Google unmobile industry specialist at
veiled on May 27 is
the consulting firm KPMG. “It
like no other.
can be an absolute sea change.”
Never mind its odd apIn addition to self-driving
pearance, which observers
cars, related technologies alliken to a cross between a
ready in use include:
golf cart and a Volkswagen
• C r a s h – avo i d a n c e .
Beetle. Or the limited perforEquipped with radars, cammance of its electric engine
eras and other tools, cars can
— a 25 mph top speed and
detect when a front-end cola range of about 100 miles.
lision is about to occur. A
The really noteworthy
number of higher-end modfeature of the latest Google
els now include systems to
prototype car is its controls.
alert the driver that something
Or, rather, the lack of them.
is wrong or even to autoThe vehicle has no steermatically take action, such as
ing wheel, accelerator or
applying the brakes if the vebrake pedal. Even though
hicle is at risk of rear-ending
Google and automobile manthe car in front.
ufacturers have been work• Assisted driving. Veing on technologies that allow
hicle manufacturers are proMotorists leaving Chicago for the Memorial Day
vehicles, at least under cerviding options that can be
weekend jam the Kennedy Expressway on May 23.
tain circumstances, to drive
activated to control cars in
Traffic problems — along with collisions and pollution —
themselves, the Google car
certain situations with the
could be reduced by self-driving cars, according to
startled observers because it
use of advanced sensors and
boosters of automated auto technology. But some
would permit no human
software.
These include
experts warn of possible downsides of autonomous
cars, including technological failure or deliberate
control except pressing a butadaptive cruise control, which
sabotage. Others say such cars could actually
ton to start or stop it. Desmonitors distances to other
increase pollution and congestion.
tinations could be chosen
vehicles; lane assist, which
with a smartphone app.
warns the driver if the vehi“They won’t have a steering wheel, say this time the promises could be- cle is veering from its lane or even
accelerator pedal or brake pedal be- come reality.
corrects the course of the car; and
Yet, it remains unclear how safe parking assist, which automatically
cause they don’t need them,” said a
Google blog post. “Our software and super-smart cars would be, how they parallel parks the car.
would affect traffic congestion, how
sensors do all the work.” 1
• Vehicle-to-vehicle communicaThe prototype, which is far from ready individuals and the nation would pay tions. Motor vehicles in the next few
for consumer use, is just the latest in- for them and whether Americans are years are expected to begin using wirenovation in the suddenly fast-moving ready to accept such a radical change less technology to communicate their
field of vehicle technology. After decades in their century-plus relationship with position, speed and direction to each
in which engineering improvements automobiles. Legislators, regulators and other as well as to certain road infrawere, for the most part, rolled out in- the public have just begun to consid- structure, such as traffic lights. Officials
crementally, dramatic advances could er these issues.
at the National Highway Traffic Safety
Enabling the breakthroughs are a Administration (NHTSA), who are worksoon change not only the vehicles themselves, but also society’s approach to combination of specially designed sen- ing to facilitate the technology, believe
personal transportation. Other gee- sors and sophisticated software sys- it will dramatically improve road safewhiz transportation technologies — fly- tems that interpret data about the road ty by alerting drivers if a nearby vehiing cars and personal jet packs — have environment and relay it to the driver cle is about to run a red light or is
remained fantasies, but many experts or directly to the car.
otherwise operating unsafely.
Getty Images/Scott Olson
T
www.cqresearcher.com
July 25, 2014
627
FUTURE OF CARS
Self-Driving Cars Allowed in Four States, D.C.
Four states and the District of Columbia have laws permitting the
driving or testing of self-driving cars, and seven rejected such laws.
Eleven other states have recently considered similar legislation.
Laws Allowing Testing or Driving of Autonomous Vehicles, by State
Wash.
Ore.
N.D.
Mont.
Idaho
Wis.
S.D.
Wyo.
Neb.
Utah
Colo.
Kan.
W.Va.
Va.
Ky.
Calif.
Ariz.
Okla.
N.M.
Tenn.
Ark.
Miss.
Texas
La.
Del.
N.C.
S.C.
Ala.
R.I.
Conn.
N.J.
Pa.
Ind. Ohio
Mo.
Mass.
N.Y.
Mich.
Iowa
Ill.
Nev.
N.H.
Vt.
Maine
Minn.
D.C.
Md.
Ga.
Fla.
Alaska
Passed
Considered
Failed*
Hawaii
* Bills did not move past committee or were voted down
Source: Gabriel Weiner and Bryant Walker Smith, “Automated Driving: Legislative
and Regulatory Action,” The Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School,
http://tinyurl.com/8l23jrl
While self-driving cars may seem
futuristic, they are expected to begin
appearing in showrooms within a few
years. Some cars already include so
many advanced features that they provide a preview of the technology. A
New York Times reviewer of Nissan’s
2014 Infiniti Q50, for example, talked
about letting the car manage its own
speed and adjust its course, even on
highways with curves.
“I found myself driving the Infiniti
on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator,
brake pedal or steering wheel,” the reviewer wrote. “Girded with digital-,
camera- and radar-based co-pilots, the
Q50 charts a course toward the selfdriving cars of tomorrow.” 2
Although Nissan, perhaps the most
aggressive car manufacturers in this
area, pledges to begin bringing selfdriving cars to market by the end of
628
CQ Researcher
the decade, other carmakers are keeping pace. The 2014 Mercedes S-Class,
for example, offers several optional
autonomous driving features, including steering, lane-maintenance and acceleration/braking at both city and
highway speeds. Volvo is readying an
adaptive cruise control for sale later
this year that includes steering assist,
enabling the car to follow the vehicle
ahead of it. General Motors and Ford
are also advancing automated technologies with the goal of offering selfdriving cars within a few years. The
GM Cadillac SRX test vehicle can be
taken for a spin on test tracks without the driver touching the steering
wheel or brakes, while Ford unveiled
a prototype self-driving car last year.
And Google since 2010 has tested a
fleet of conventional cars equipped
with self-driving features on more than
500,000 miles of roads.
Boosters envision a future in which
the road experience is entirely transformed. If technology reliably enables
vehicles to communicate with each
other and use sensors to maintain
safe distances, most collisions could
be avoided. Congestion could be reduced (along with excessive pollution
associated with cars inching forward
in traffic jams) if cars could safely follow each other much more closely
while traveling at high speeds. Platoons of trucks could ship goods more
efficiently and safely. A fleet of automated cars could even reshape the
transportation system, as people might
choose to summon self-driving taxis
for commutes or errands rather than
purchasing their own car.
When Google announced widespread testing of self-driving vehicles
in 2010, the company explained its
motivation in terms of sweeping benefits to society: “Our goal is to help
prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car
use.” 3 The company’s plans for marketing the technology remain unknown,
although executives at traditional carmakers are nervously wondering if it
may emerge as a competitor. 4
The company has stressed that selfdriving cars would benefit some of the
most vulnerable members of society,
such as elderly people who can no
longer drive. In a YouTube video, a
Google engineer chatted with a blind
man, Steve Mahan, as he used a selfdriving car to run errands. “I love it,”
said Mahan. “Where this would change
my life is to give me the independence
and the flexibility to go [to] the places
I both want to go and need to go.” 5
The potential of automated cars,
however, can go only so far in meeting the nation’s transportation challenges. Even if such vehicles achieve
their potential, they are not expected
to compensate for an overloaded aviation system and lack of high-speed
rail, or put an end to motor vehicle
Traffic Fatalities Hit Five-Decade Low
Motor vehicle deaths fell to 32,479 in 2011, the fewest in nearly five decades, before rising slightly in
2012. Fatalities peaked at 54,589 in 1972. The number of deaths per 100 million miles traveled declined
from six to 1.1 from 1954 to 2012 thanks to improved automobile safety, better road designs and heightened awareness of drunken driving.
Fatalities (in thousands)
60
Motor Vehicle Fatalities, 1954-2012
50
40
30
1954 ’56 ’58 1960 ’62 ’64 ’66 ’68 1970 ’72 ’74 ’76 ’78 1980 ’82 ’84 ’86 ’88 1990 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 2000 ’02 ’04 ’06 ’08 2010 ’12
8
7
6
Motor Vehicle Fatalities
Per 100 Million Miles Traveled,
1954 2012
1954-2012
Getty Images/William Th
Thomas Cain
Fatalities/100 million vehicle
miles traveled (VMT)
5
4
3
2
1
1954 ’56 ’58 1960 ’62 ’64 ’66 ’68 1970 ’72 ’74 ’76 ’78 1980 ’82 ’84 ’86 ’88 1990 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 2000 ’02 ’04 ’06 ’08 2010 ’12
Source: 2011-12 data from “Traffic Safety Facts, 2012 Data,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), U.S.
Department of Transportation, May 2014, http://tinyurl.com/km6pmvc; 1975-2010 data from NHTSA, Fatality Analysis Reporting
System; 1954-74 data from National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and state
accident summaries
emissions that contribute to air pollution and climate change.
In fact, some experts warn that this
technological leap, like any other advance, comes with potential downsides. Automated cars and vehicle-tovehicle communications could make
traffic dangerously susceptible to technological failure or to deliberate sabotage, and they wouldn’t do away with
some motorists speeding or otherwise
maneuvering their cars aggressively.
While the new technologies could potentially reduce the annual death toll
of about 33,000 people on U.S. roads,
experts worry that a major accident
or a death caused by a self-driving
www.cqresearcher.com
car could have much different ramifications than one caused by a negligent driver.
Even if autonomous cars save thousands of lives, “One headline, ‘Machine
Kills a Child,’ trumps 30,000 obituaries,”
said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at
the Center for Automotive Research at
Stanford University. 6
Others caution that automated cars,
far from making transportation less
stressful, could further clog roads, cause
more air pollution, or lead to more
sprawling development if they are so
convenient people don’t mind sitting
in them for long commutes.
“If the transition isn’t managed ap-
propriately, there could be unanticipated negative consequences as a result of behavior changes and land-use
changes,” says University of Texas computer science professor Peter Stone,
who is researching future approaches
to traffic management.
“Personally, I’m excited about it.
But you have to adopt a little bit of
cautious optimism with any new technology,” he says. “I think it would be
naïve to say it will have an entirely
positive effect on society.”
The future price of automated cars
is also uncertain. The light-detection
and ranging system atop a Google
self-driving car, known as lidar, costs
July 25, 2014
629
FUTURE OF CARS
about $70,000 and enables the vehicle to scan its surroundings and determine its location. Additional sensors, software and technology can add
another $30,000. But, as with other
technology, observers expect the costs
to plunge with mass production. 7
Even once the technology is available and prices fall, it may be many
years before self-driving cars become
widespread. Americans are not as quick
to buy new cars as in the past because cars are engineered to last longer,
and it is not clear whether consumers
will soon warm up to the concept of
robotic vehicles. A mix of traditional
and automated cars on the highways
may place new strains on infrastructure, as engineers have begun looking into the possibility of designating
lanes for each and redesigning intersections and traffic lights to accommodate the different types of vehicles.
Automotive experts say self-driving
features will be phased in slowly, as
vehicles transition from being partially to more fully autonomous. “You
have to introduce the technology on
a gradual basis,” says Brad Stertz, a
spokesman for Audi of America. “It’s
not like in two years we’re all going
be in the back seat watching movies.”
Rapid automotive technological
progress has caught the attention of
policy makers. Four states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to
regulate automated vehicles, and about
a dozen others have begun debating
legislation, spurred in part by NHTSA
recommendations urging states to begin
looking into the legal and safety ramifications. (See map, p. 628.) For instance,
who is liable when an autonomous
vehicle gets into an accident?
Other countries, especially those
with large automakers, are moving
ahead on regulations to permit selfdriving cars. Last year, for example,
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
took a ride in a self-driving car and
pledged to support the technology as
part of his economic program. 8
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CQ Researcher
This comes as other technological
advances are increasing the financial
strain on the U.S. system for building
and maintaining roads and bridges.
More fuel-efficient cars, particularly
electric ones, mean drivers buy less
gasoline. That translates into less revenue for highway trust funds, which
finance roads with money from gasoline taxes. Declining gas receipts are
sparking battles in Washington and
state capitals around the country, as
policy makers scramble to make up
the difference. (See Current Situation,
p. 643.)
As emerging automotive technologies promise to reshape the transportation system, here are some of the
key questions being debated:
Will new technologies improve
safety?
Although automobile accident rates
have dropped significantly in recent
decades, about 33,000 people still die
annually on American roads and more
than 3 million are injured, according
to NHTSA. Annual cost to the economy: $277 billion, according to the
agency. 9
Many experts say new technologies,
including vehicle-to-vehicle communications and self-driving cars, will make
roads safer, because at least 90 percent of accidents are caused at least
in part by human error. As safety systems become more automated, human
error will become a less important factor, they say. 10
“We think there’s a great potential
here to improve the safety of transportation,” says David Zuby, vice president and chief research officer of the
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an Arlington, Va., group funded by
auto insurers.
Over the past several decades,
carmakers have incorporated such
safety technologies as air bags, antilock
brakes, electronic stability controls
and, more recently, rearview cameras and adaptive headlights, which
automatically adjust as the car changes
direction and speed. These innovations, coupled with improvements in
road design and heightened public
awareness of the dangers of drunken driving, have reduced motor vehicle deaths about 40 percent from
a peak of 54,589 in 1972. 11 (See
graphic, p. 629.)
Some new higher-end models now
offer front-crash prevention systems
that use sensors, such as cameras,
radar or lidar, to detect when a car is
getting dangerously close to the vehicle in front of it. These systems generally are designed to alert the driver
and pre-charge the brakes to maximize their effect. In some cases, the
system brakes the car if the driver
doesn’t respond.
Carmakers are also beginning to
offer vehicles with lane departure warning systems, which detect how close
the car is to lane markings and alert
the driver if the car is about to drift
across the line while the turn signal is
off. A more advanced variant, known
as lane keeping assist, automatically
keeps the car centered in its lane.
As much as these technologies are
designed to improve safety, experts
see far bigger gains in the future. Part
of the reason: NHTSA is working on
regulations to foster vehicle-to-vehicle
and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems, which will alert vehicles to fast-developing dangerous situations nearby.
For example, if highway traffic suddenly comes to a halt, the drivers of
approaching cars will be notified so
they will have ample time to brake—
even if the backup is around a curve
and not yet visible. Or, if a driver is
speeding toward an intersection where
the light is about to turn red, the light
in the other direction may remain red
for a few additional seconds to prevent other cars from being struck.
Such connected vehicle technology would address about 80 percent
of crash scenarios that involve non-
www.cqresearcher.com
constant speed while human-controlled
cars zip around them. “Even if tomorrow the Google car went on sale
and was guaranteed never to crash, it
would take 20 to 30 years before
everyone had one in their driveway,”
Zuby says. “There’s definitely a concern for any intermediate period.”
There also are worries about drivers abusing the technology. An internal FBI report speculates that autonomous cars could become “lethal
rate increasing to 10 to 15 percent with
more advanced systems that automatically applied the brakes, Zuby says.
But lane departure warning systems
have an inconsistent effect on safety.
Some of the institute’s research has
suggested no benefits, although the
group’s most recent analysis of one
model found that a lane departure
warning system combined with forward collision warning reduced crashes with other vehicles by 14 percent.
AFP/Getty Images/Yoshikazu Tsuno
impaired drivers, according to NHTSA.
“This technology could help prevent
the majority of types of crashes that
typically occur in the real world, such
as crashes at intersections or while
changing lanes,” the agency said. 12
The technology could not greatly improve safety until it has been installed
in a large number of vehicles that can
communicate. Although it can take some
time for such vehicles to become common — the average American owns a
car for about five years, and used cars
remain on the road for many years —
some experts predict there will be aftermarket products that will enable
even an older car to communicate with
other vehicles and infrastructure.
“I think you’ll see a full-court press,
with aftermarket products and even
apps on smartphones, to get to the
critical threshold as soon as possible,”
says Leo McCloskey, senior vice president for technical programs at the
Washington-based Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
A report last year by the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think
tank, concluded that traffic deaths could
drop by 21,700 per year if 90 percent
of vehicles were self-driving. Automated vehicles “can be programmed to not
break traffic laws. They do not drink
and drive. Their reaction times are
quicker,” the report stated. 13
Safety experts, however, say much
will depend on the safety standards the
government sets for the vehicles and on
how the technologies work in practice.
Otherwise, said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Washington-based
consumer advocacy group Center for
Auto Safety, “you could be substituting
computer errors for human errors.” 14
Safety also could become compromised as vehicles with different levels
of technology share the same roads,
whether because drivers are reluctant
to accept the technology or because
they can’t afford to do so. Automated
cars, for example, could be closely following each other and maintaining a
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gets the feel of Toyota’s autonomous vehicle
in Tokyo on Nov. 9, 2013. Abe also tried out driverless Hondas and Nissans. He
has pledged to support driverless technology as part of his economic program.
weapons,” with criminals using them
as self-driving getaway cars, according
to the website of the British newspaper
The Guardian, which said it obtained
a copy of the report. 15
Underscoring both the benefits and
limits of new technologies, a series of
studies by the Insurance Institute for
Highway Safety found that recently installed automotive safety systems are
generating uneven results. The institute
found that cars with forward collisionavoidance systems that warned the driver of upcoming dangers had a 7 percent reduction in accidents with other
vehicles, with the accident reduction
Experts wonder whether drivers could
become so reliant on automated cars
that they stopped paying attention to
the road — and were unable to respond quickly if the technology failed.
There may be an analog with the aviation industry, where some pilots appear to become so dependent on technology that their flying skills get rusty.
Last month, for example, a National
Transportation Safety Board panel
blamed pilot error for the July 6, 2013,
crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at
San Francisco International Airport, saying the crew mismanaged the landing
after relying too much on automated
July 25, 2014
631
FUTURE OF CARS
Fewer Teens, Young Adults Are Driving
Only 41 percent of American teenagers had a driver’s license in 2012,
down from 56 percent in 1982. Young adults in their 20s and 30s
also are driving less, with the number of licensed 20- to 24-year-olds
falling 12 percentage points, 25- to 29-year-olds nine points and 30to 39-year-olds eight points.
Percentage of Licensed Drivers by Age Group, 1982 and 2012
100%
80
60
40
20
0
19
19 and
and
d
under
20-24
20-2
20
-24
24
2
25
25-29
5-2
-29
29
30
30-39
-39
-3
39
4
40
40-59
0-5
-59
59
6
60
60-70
0-7
70
70-plus
70
7
0-p
plus
lus
lu
Source: “Table DL-20, Distribution of Licensed Drivers — 2012, by
1982
Sex and Percentage in Each Age Group and Relation to Population,”
2012
Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation,
January 2014, http://tinyurl.com/lprscyo; “Table DL-20 — Highway Statistics 1982,”
Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, September 1983,
p. 32, http://tinyurl.com/maq8ofy
flight controls that they did not entirely understand.
Zuby says it will be a major challenge
to design technologies that improve safety without allowing drivers to pay even
less attention than they do now.
“If your car is nearly all the way automated, drivers are going to be tempted to take advantage of that and engage in things that are not related to
monitoring what is going on around
them,” he says. “You could have a problem if the system depends on them
knowing when to take over. That’s something that people who are designing
these systems are struggling with.”
Will new technologies reduce
congestion?
On the congested streets of New
York City, vehicles have barely picked
up speed since horse-and-buggy days.
A recent study, using GPS devices
in taxicabs, found the average pace in
Manhattan on weekdays is 9.5 miles per
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CQ Researcher
hour. That’s “about the speed of a farmyard chicken at full gallop.” On a busy
day, when speeds drop to 7.5 miles per
hour, cars would barely be able to keep
pace with a horse and cart or a Central
Park jogger. 16
Such driving speeds are not unusual for major cities — and that’s assuming
favorable conditions. Accidents or relatively minor snowstorms can spawn
seemingly interminable gridlock. Many
Atlanta drivers spent six hours or more
to travel a few miles on Jan. 28, when
a couple inches of snow brought traffic to a standstill. “This was, hands
down, the worst day of my life,” said
Evan McLean of Canton, Ga., who spent
two and a half hours without any forward progress. 17
Traffic congestion is estimated to cost
the United States more than $100 billion
a year in wasted time and fuel, not
to mention air pollution caused by
idling cars. 18 The effect on quality of
life in the United States and overseas
— where heavy traffic in growing
megacities can be even worse — is
incalculable.
Those who say new automotive
technologies could reduce traffic delays cite several reasons:
• Accidents should become less frequent, especially as anticollision systems
and vehicle-to-vehicle communication
become common. This would result in
far fewer accident-related backups.
• Vehicles that can communicate
with each other and with roadside
infrastructure may be able to safely
proceed through intersections with
stop signs without stopping when no
other vehicles are present or by alternating with each other more efficiently when traffic exists. In time,
emerging technologies may even eliminate the need for traffic signals and
stop signs.
• Traffic flows are expected to become more efficient. There would be
fewer incidents of human drivers trying
to save time with maneuvers such as
cutting in and out of lanes, which may
gain a few moments for an individual
car but slow down traffic overall.
• Automated vehicles will be able
to follow each other much more closely and at higher speeds because they
will have information about what the
cars around them are planning to do.
Thus, highways could safely accommodate substantially more cars and trucks.
“You can pack a lot more vehicles
on the highways, they can run optimally to reduce traffic jams, and you
don’t have all the lane changing that
slows traffic down,” says John O’Dell,
senior editor of Edmunds, the carshopping website, and a longtime observer of the automobile industry. “Cars
will be able to form platoons and increase the speed at which they can
safely travel.”
“It’s not going to eliminate congestion, but I think we’re going to see a
dramatic reduction,” says McCloskey of
the Intelligent Transportation Society of
America.
A 2011 study by Columbia University indicated that fully automated vehicles could eventually increase highway capacity to nearly four times current
levels because the cars will be able
to safely travel more closely together.
At present, vehicles take up just 5 percent of highway capacity (about 2,200
vehicles per lane per hour) because
human drivers require considerable
space around their cars to ensure safety. But if all cars were automated, the
spacing between vehicles would drop
from about 150 feet to 20, the researchers estimated. 19
Other analysts, however, doubt the
new technologies will end traffic jams.
“It can help around the margins,” says
Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, in Ann
Arbor, Mich., which studies trends and
changes related to the automotive industry. (The center is not related to
the similarly named center at Stanford
University.) “But there really are no
solutions for too many vehicles in the
same place at the same time. To the
extent that we’re car dependent,
there’s only so much capacity out there.
New York City rush hour is not going
to be aided.”
Some even worry that autonomous
vehicles, far from easing gridlock, may
make it worse. The reason: Motorists
may be more willing to sit in traffic
if they can work or read while their
car is driving. If the technology advances to the point that people can
send their cars on errands, such as
picking up groceries or even their children, that could further clog roads
with empty vehicles.
“I know that people are already
careless in their car use,” says Robin
Chase, an entrepreneur and cofounder
of car-sharing services Buzzcar and
Zipcar. “When they don’t have to be
in their cars, they will be more profligate. The attitude can be, ‘Even if my
car sits in traffic for two hours, what
do I care?’ ”
www.cqresearcher.com
Will consumers buy automated
cars?
The love affair between Americans
and cars runs deep.
From an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 to
a sporty red Corvette, automobiles have
been the passkeys to freedom and selfreliance. As heralded by the earliest
rock n’ roll songs and hit movies such
as “American Graffiti” and “Thelma and
Louise,” Americans, it seems, are destined to be behind the wheel.
So why would motorists voluntarily
give up driving and hand over the
controls to self-driving cars?
Some who follow the automotive market say consumers may be receptive because driving has lost some of its appeal. “Do you want to drive in your car
when in reality you’re stuck in traffic,
you’re frustrated, you can’t find a place
to park?” asks entrepreneur Chase. “In
daily commuting to work and running
errands with your kids, I don’t think
many people say, ‘I love driving.’ I feel
like every time I drive, I’m shortening
my life through frustration.”
O’Dell of Edmunds, who lives in the
congested Los Angeles area, feels much
the same. “I’m like a great many people of my generation who grew up
thinking of driving as an escape and
as a fun thing to do because the roads
weren’t as crowded when we were 16
or 17 years old,” says O’Dell, who got
his first driver’s license in 1963. “Now
it’s no longer fun. I’d be happy if I
could push a button and lean back and
let the car do the driving.”
But polls indicate it may take some
time before the public warms up to
the new technology.
In April, a survey by the Pew Research Center concluded that Americans
were roughly split over whether they
would be willing to ride in an automated car. Forty-eight percent of respondents said they would, while 50 percent
said they would not. 20
A survey last year commissioned by
the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies found that two-thirds of re-
spondents would not feel comfortable
in a self-piloted car, and only 18 percent said they would buy one. 21
An aversion to self-driving cars is
understandable, according to Stanford’s
Smith. “It’s the fear of robots,” he said.
“We saw that in the Toyota unintended acceleration cases, when people
would describe their horror at feeling
like they could lose control of their
car.” 22 In those sometimes-fatal cases,
cars sped up uncontrollably, seemingly
on their own. At first Toyota blamed driver error, but it eventually recalled millions of cars for design defects. In March,
the company agreed to a $1.2 billion
U.S. criminal penalty and admitted it had
lied about the causes. 23
But the Chubb survey also revealed
some ambivalence, especially about some
of the features that enable cars to drive
themselves. For example, 88 percent of
respondents said they would pay extra
for a system that alerts a driver if the
vehicle inadvertently drifts out of its
lane, 77 percent want a car to automatically apply the brakes to avoid or
minimize a crash, and 70 percent were
open to an adaptive cruise control system that would maintain both a set speed
and a safe distance from other traffic.
In a recent study of the issue, the
consulting company KPMG concluded
that consumers would warm up to the
idea of self-driving cars as they become more aware of the potential advantages. They would even be willing
to pay a premium of 15 percent if it
meant a better experience on the road.
The KPMG team conducted a series of focus groups. At the beginning
of each two-hour discussion, the groups
were roughly split, with about six in
10 people saying they would be willing to ride in an autonomous car. But
that number climbed to nine in 10 or
even reached unanimity after the groups
were asked how they would feel if
the drive time could be more predictable and shorter and if the vehicle was certified by an organization
such as NHTSA. 24
July 25, 2014
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FUTURE OF CARS
won approval of a bill last year regulating self-driving cars. “But you talk to
some of the older folks, who have
trouble seeing at night or have trouble
driving, they’re excited. And a lot of
younger people don’t want to be bothered driving — they say just give me
mass transit or a car that can get me
from point A to point B.” (See graphic, p. 632.)
Automated cars may prove to be especially appealing to people with disabilities as well as to the elderly — an
increasingly important demographic as
baby boomers age. Self-driving cars will
“make people more independent,” said
Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan’s Research Center in Silicon Valley. 25
One way to ease consumer fears
may be to provide an option to take
over the controls. “I would long for the
day when I can push a button and the
car will do all my work on my miserable commute,” says O’Dell. “But on
a nice weekend drive, I’d want to turn
off that autonomous function.”
BACKGROUND
8,000 Cars to 8 Million
n the mid-1880s, after decades in
which inventors worked on various
approaches to self-propelled road vehicles. In 1885, German engineer Karl
Benz created the first gasoline-powered
motor vehicle, which had three bicyclestyle wire wheels and a four-stroke
engine. In the same year, another
German engineer — Gottlieb Daimler
— attached a four-stroke gas engine to
a bicycle, creating the first motorcycle.
When the 20th century began, there
were an estimated 8,000 automobiles in
the United States. The technology, which
promised to transform long-distance
travel, initially evoked mixed reactions.
I
A futuristic ad from the mid-1950s shows a family playing dominoes in their selfdriving car. Sponsored by “America’s Independent Electric Light and Power
Companies,” or by individual local utilities, the ad appeared in newspapers and
magazines and reads in part, “Electricity may be the driver. One day your car may
speed along an electric superhighway, its speed and steering automatically
controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. . . . No traffic jams . . .
no collisions . . . no driver fatigue.”
“A vast majority moved to wanting
it and even be willing to pay a premium for it,” says KPMG’s Silberg.
Automotive experts see potential
generational differences in attitudes. Elderly people whose reflexes have slowed
and younger people who may be more
focused on texting and Internet con-
634
CQ Researcher
nectivity tend to be the most accepting
of the idea of turning over the wheel.
“A lot of people who are in the 40s
and 50s and enjoy driving have no interest in the self-driving cars,” says
Michigan state Sen. Mike Kowall, a Republican who is vice-chairman of the
Senate Transportation Committee, who
Continued on p. 636
Chronology
Early
1900s
Car manufacturers introduce
major innovations such as
electric starter, hydraulic
brakes, automatic transmission
and independent suspension.
1908
Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Co. builds
first production Model T. As Model T
prices fall, millions of Americans
will become car owners.
1965
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader
assails car industry’s approach to
safety in his exposé, Unsafe at
Any Speed, which accuses car
manufacturers of resisting safety
features such as seat belts, and
ushers in era of greater attention
to automotive safety.
•
1970s-1990s
Concerns about traffic, air pol-
1913
Revolutionizing American manufacturing, Ford installs first conveyer
belt assembly line, reducing costs.
lution and gas shortages grow;
consumers begin focusing on
fuel efficiency and reliability.
1921
Federal Highway Act provides
matching funds to states to create
national highway system.
1970
President Richard M. Nixon signs
Clean Air Act, regulating motor
vehicle emissions.
1925
American inventor Francis P. Houdina
demonstrates radio-controlled, driverless car in New York City traffic.
1973
Oil embargo imposed by members
of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) leads
to gas shortages.
1939
General Motors (GM) exhibit at
New York World’s Fair depicts
radio-controlled, driverless electric
cars powered by circuits embedded in the roadway.
•
1950s-60s
America’s love affair with cars heats
up after World War II, as consumers flock to muscle cars
and United States builds more
highways.
1956
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
signs Federal-Aid Highway Act of
1956, authorizing construction of
Interstate Highway System.
www.cqresearcher.com
1975
Congress requires corporate average
fuel economy (CAFE) standards.
1979
With the Big Three U.S. automakers facing increasing competition
from overseas competitors, Congress authorizes $1.5 billion loan
to foundering Chrysler Corp.,
keeping the company in business.
1999
Japanese carmaker Honda releases
the Insight, the first hybrid car to
be mass-marketed in the United
States. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) says it gets 61 mpg
in city driving, 70 mpg on the
highway.
2000s
Development of
more advanced vehicles, including automated cars, speeds up.
2005
Five no-driver vehicles successfully
navigate a 132-mile course in
Nevada in a competition sponsored by U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
2010
Google announces its self-driving
cars have logged more than
140,000 miles.
2011
Nevada becomes first state to establish regulations governing testing self-driving cars.
2013
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA) releases
guidelines to states on regulating
testing of self-driving vehicles. . . .
Google invests $258 million in
Uber Technologies, whose mobile
apps run car services.
2014
NHTSA announces it will take
steps to enable vehicle-to-vehicle
communication (Feb. 3). . . .
Google unveils automated car
without a steering wheel or gas or
brake pedals (May 27). . . . GM
recalls 8 million more cars for
safety reasons following previous
recall of more than 20 million earlier this year (June 30). . . . Congressional Budget Office warns
that a shortage of federal highway
funds will force delays in federal
payments to states. . . . Sens. Bob
Corker, R-Tenn., and Chris Murphy,
D-Conn., propose raising gas tax
by 12 centers per gallon, indexed
to inflation, to provide more highway funds.
July 25, 2014
635
FUTURE OF CARS
Laser Is Key to Self-Driving Cars
Combination of technologies lets vehicle study its environment.
lthough self-driving vehicles may seem futuristic, most
cars already come equipped with some automated features. Cruise control keeps a car’s speed steady on highways, antilock brakes prevent brakes from locking up and newer
stability and traction control systems deter skidding or rollovers.
Some higher-end models offer advanced systems to keep
the vehicles within their lane, adjust the speed while in cruise
control to maintain a safe distance from other cars and sound
a warning or apply the brakes to avoid a forward collision.
These features rely on sensors, such as radar or cameras, that
scan the environment and relay the information to onboard
software systems.
To move beyond computerized control of key steering, acceleration and braking systems and build a vehicle that can
drive itself, three additional features are required: sensors to
detect what is happening around the vehicle, a mapping system so the vehicle can follow a route and software to pull all
the information together. 1
With Google’s self-driving cars, the primary sensor is a laser
range finder, or lidar, mounted on the roof. It generates a threedimensional map of the environment as the car moves along. Because it can see in all directions, it may gather more information
than a human driver.
Additional information comes from other sensors. These include four radar devices — two each on the front and rear
bumpers — that enable the car to detect other traffic; a camera to detect traffic lights; GPS; an inertial measurement unit
A
Continued from p. 634
As long as automobiles were beyond the easy reach of all but the
wealthy, they spurred resentment as
playthings of the rich that posed a
public safety threat and frightened livestock. A letter writer to The New York
Times referred to car owners as the
“idle and vicious rich.” 26
But that view began to change when
industrialist Henry Ford made cars widely affordable. After introducing the iconic Model T in 1908, Ford revolutionized automobiles — and American
manufacturing — by installing the first
conveyer belt-based assembly line in
his Highland Park, Mich., car factory
in 1913. Thanks to modern assembly
line techniques that reduced manufacturing costs, the Ford Motor Co. built
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CQ Researcher
(which incorporates gyroscopes and accelerometers); and wheel
encoders that work together to determine the car’s location and
speed and to track its movements.
The car’s software combines those measurements with highresolution maps of roads and terrain, producing various data
models so it can avoid obstacles and comply with traffic laws.
Even though these maps are very detailed and supplement GPS
measurements (which can be off by several yards), Google engineers also drive along the planned route to gather more information about the environment. That way, when the car drives
itself, it can compare current observations with previous ones,
enabling it to differentiate between pedestrians and fixed objects such as light poles. 2
Because the autonomous car has to contend with human
drivers in other traditional vehicles, engineers have added programming to keep it from being too passive. When approaching a four-way intersection, for example, it stops and yields.
But if other cars do not yield as expected, the autonomous car
will advance a little to demonstrate to other drivers where it
is trying to go.
Without such programming, Google engineers have discovered, an autonomous car has trouble functioning in an environment where other cars are driven by humans.
As sophisticated as the cars are, there are certain things they
cannot do. For example, Google has found that a car cannot
decipher the hand gestures of a traffic police officer. Instead,
it will detect “there’s a person standing in the middle of the
more than 15 million Model T’s in the
United States by 1927, becoming the
world’s largest car manufacturer. The
cars were plain to look at — each was
black because that paint color dried
quickly — but they were affordable,
selling for as little as about $260, or
about $3,500 in 2014 dollars.
Ford’s innovations marked the beginning of America’s car culture, transforming the automobile from a luxury item for the wealthy to essential
transportation. By 1920, U.S. vehicle
ownership had increased to 8 million.
America Transformed
F
ew inventions have changed the
nation as much as the automobile.
Dirt roads that worked well for horses
would trap early cars in mud. Gas stations and road maps were non-existent.
When Horatio Nelson Jackson and a
co-driver became the first to drive across
the country in 1903, their countless breakdowns highlighted the need for more
durable automobiles and better roads.
Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old
housewife and mother from Hackensack, N.J., chronicled her misadventures
when she became the first woman to
make the cross-country drive in 1909:
“At Fort Steele, Wyoming, we pulled
up short at a dead-end in the road
where the bridge over the swollen North
Platte had been washed out. I sent my
passengers ahead on foot across a paralleling Union Pacific railroad trestle
and then bumped the Maxwell for three-
Google/Link: http://is.gd/JwEO70
An image from an April 28 testing video by Google shows how the company’s self-driving car perceives nearby moving
traffic, stopped cars and traffic signals. Inset at lower left shows how the road would look to a human inside the car.
The light-detection and ranging system atop the self-driving car, a type of technology known as lidar,
allows the vehicle to scan its surroundings and determine its location.
road waving their hands in a funny way,” said Google software lead Dmitri Dolgov. At that point, he said, the car will
act conservatively — or it will ask the human behind the wheel
to take control. 3
— David Hosansky
quarters of a mile on the ties to the
opposite side. Across Wyoming the
roads threaded through privately owned
cattle ranches. My companions were
obliged to take turns opening and closing the gates of the fences which surrounded them as we drove through. If
we got lost we’d take to the high
ground and search the horizon for the
nearest telephone poles with the most
wires. It was a sure way of locating
the transcontinental railroad which we
knew would lead us back to civilization. In Utah we hit a prairie dog hole
in the road with such force that a tie
bolt came out of the tie rod connecting the front wheels.” 27
Automobilists banded together to
form associations in major cities, some
of which joined forces in 1902 to form
www.cqresearcher.com
1 “How does a self-driving car work?” The Economist, April 29, 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/cu95hqs.
2 Erico Guizzo, “How Google’s self-driving car works,” IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 18,
2011, http://tinyurl.com/3l4bvnz.
3 Alex Davies, “Avoiding squirrels and other things that Google’s robot car
can’t do,” Wired, May 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/qcso8kk.
the American Automobile Association
(AAA). These associations lobbied for
pro-automobile legislation and for appropriations to build and improve highways. The federal government stepped
in after World War I with the Federal
Highway Act of 1921, which provided
federal matching funds to states to create a national highway system.
As the number of registered drivers
nearly tripled during the 1920s to 23
million, the landscape and the economy were transformed. Gas stations
and motels sprang up alongside new
highways. Roadside diners began offering quickly prepared food, such as
hamburgers, french fries and milk
shakes, so drivers in a hurry could
get on their way. Demand for steel,
vulcanized rubber and oil skyrocket-
ed. Road construction created tens of
thousands of jobs. The American love
affair with the car endured the Depression and World War II, then
reached new heights after President
Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, authorizing construction of the interstate
highway system.
But even as Americans enjoyed the
freedom offered by cars, they confronted an increasingly apparent downside. As car ownership rose, with
many families owning two vehicles,
traffic congestion worsened. To provide easy access to urban areas, highways were built through cities, often
dividing neighborhoods and destroying
historic districts. By the mid-1960s, the
annual death toll from auto accidents
July 25, 2014
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FUTURE OF CARS
When Cars Are Smarter, Roads Can Be Smarter, Too
“Everything’s changed but our highways”
world with smart cars may not need traditional traffic
signals, streetlights or other fixtures of today’s road system.
Experts say, for instance, that if cars can communicate, red lights
won’t need to stay red when no traffic is coming. One model, developed by researchers at the University of Texas, foresees vehicles approaching an intersection and making “reservations” with a
virtual traffic coordinator that will rapidly assign them time slots
so they can proceed through the intersection without coming to
a full stop or possibly even slowing down very much.
“They can almost go through it at full speed,” says University of Texas computer science professor Peter Stone, who is
studying how such a system could be implemented safely. “The
vehicles have to slow down a little bit so they can be finely interweaved, but they accelerate and decelerate much less.”
The phasing out of traffic lights, while still many years away,
is just one potential change to highways and intersections. Designing lanes that can provide charges to passing electric vehicles is one of the most active areas of research among engineers and visionaries around the world. Last year, the city of
Gumi, South Korea, turned on a system that powers electric
buses on a 15-mile urban route. The charge comes from subsurface electrical cables that create magnetic fields. A receiving
device installed on the underbody of the bus converts these
magnetic fields into electricity. 1
In Germany, the electrical engineering company Siemens is
taking a different approach: outfitting stretches of the autobahn
with overhead electric cables. This would enable hybrid trucks
with diesel-electric engines to use these designated lanes for long-
A
began to exceed 50,000. Mounting concerns about air pollution spurred the
1970 Clean Air Act, which regulated
emissions from motor vehicles as well
as other sources. The 1973 oil embargo led to limited supplies of gasoline and seemingly endless lines at the
pump. The Big Three automakers began
facing increasing competition as consumers bought foreign cars — especially reliable and energy-efficient models from Japan. 28
Improved Technology
n the early years of automobiles,
manufacturers had rolled out a series of important innovations: the elec-
I
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CQ Researcher
distance, zero-carbon transport. Operating somewhat like San Francisco street cars, the trucks would automatically switch to electric
mode when they physically attach to the overhead cables. 2
A more audacious vision for charging electric vehicles comes
from an Idaho startup company, Solar Roadways. It wants to
resurface U.S. roads with solar panels, which theoretically could
generate more than triple the electricity the nation uses while
providing other benefits such as warming wintertime roads to
prevent ice buildup. Although the cost may ultimately be prohibitive, Solar Roadways has received two rounds of funding from
the Federal Highway Administration and has built a prototype
parking lot made of solar panels, microprocessors and LED lights
— energy-efficient light-emitting diodes — encased in textured
glass that it says can support a 250,000-pound truck. 3
But charging electric vehicles is just one part of the picture.
Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist who specializes in interactive works, has emerged as an unlikely visionary for rethinking pavement design.
Roosegaarde has teamed up with Heijmans, a traditional infrastructure developer in Holland, to create glow-in-the-dark
roads that use specially formulated, luminescent green markings. The goal is to eliminate the need for street lights and
save electricity in busier areas, while illuminating more remote
stretches of roads that previously did not have lights.
The team also is studying the feasibility of affixing symbols
to road surfaces that can alert drivers or specially equipped
cars under certain conditions. One approach is to design giant
snowflakes on roads with a type of paint that appears when
temperatures drop below freezing and roads become slick.
tric starter, four-wheel hydraulic brakes,
windshield wipers, automatic transmission, power steering, front-wheel drive,
independent suspension and more. But
by the 1930s and ’40s, as cars began
taking modern form and the number
of manufacturers dwindled, companies
focused on cosmetic changes and increasingly powerful engines. Major advances, such as the emergence of modern electric and hybrid engines at the
beginning of the 21st century, were few.
But automotive engineers never
stopped thinking about radical changes.
One of the most visionary notions, often
dismissed as science fiction, was that
cars could one day drive themselves.
The concept dates back at least as far
as 1925, when American inventor Fran-
cis P. Houdina demonstrated a radiocontrolled, driverless car in New York
City that navigated traffic on Broadway
and Fifth Avenue. The vehicle, equipped
with a special antenna, was operated
by a second car that followed closely
and sent out radio impulses, controlling small electric motors that directed
every movement. At the 1939 New
York World’s Fair, General Motors
sponsored an exhibit depicting electric
cars powered by circuits embedded in
the road and controlled by radio.
After World War II, interest in autonomous cars increased, with a focus
on using specialized devices in roads
to guide the vehicles. Nebraska worked
with General Motors and RCA Labs in
the 1950s to demonstrate a self-driving
car that was guided on a strip of highway outside Lincoln by a series of experimental detector circuits in the pavement. Further testing in the 1960s and
’70s demonstrated that cars could be
controlled with buried magnetic cables.
But as radar, lidar and other technologies advanced during the second
half of the 20th century, attention turned
to equipping vehicles so they could
drive themselves without special roadway devices. Mercedes-Benz in the
1980s developed a self-driving van that
navigated quiet city streets at speeds
up to 39 mph, while a consortium of
U.S. research institutes developed an
autonomous land vehicle.
In 1991, Congress passed legislation
instructing the U.S. Department of
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AFP/Getty Images/Remko de Waal
Roosegaarde said he is motivated by a concern that the
pace of technological innovation has left roads behind.
“Everything’s changed but our highways,” he said. “I wondered why we’re sinking millions into these obsolete and
ugly monstrosities instead of creating something new and
better.” 4
It remains to be seen, however, whether any of these approaches wins widespread adoption. The technological challenges aside, upgrading thousands of miles of roads may prove
prohibitively expensive. In the United States, for instance, policy makers are scrambling to find money just to maintain the
current system of roads and bridges. (See “Current Situation,”
p. 643.)
“These kinds of ideas always sound great,” said Ferdinand
Duddenhöffer, a German mobility expert at the University of
Duisburg-Essen. “But the question is how much do they cost,
and the answer is usually quite vague.” 5
Stone and his Texas team have won considerable attention for their work on intersections, partly because it could
point the way to more efficient, safer traffic flow. Intersections are inherently dangerous places because cars cross them
from different directions — and most accidents that occur
there could be eliminated by so-called smart intersections,
he says.
Now Stone is studying dynamic lane changes. In a future
of self-driving cars that communicate with each other, why have
four-lane highways on which two lanes always move one way?
Depending on traffic flows, it may be more efficient to have
three lanes of vehicles traffic in one direction and one lane in
Special luminescent paint lights up a highway near Oss,
The Netherlands. Glow-in-the-dark roads could eliminate
the need for street lights while illuminating remote,
unlighted roads.
the other — with the potential to switch at any time, depending
on traffic patterns.
“With autonomous cars,” Stone says, “you could potentially
have a system for changing the direction of traffic in a lane
on a minute-by-minute basis.”
— David Hosansky
1
Bill Chappell, “The Road that Gives Electric Vehicles a Charge,” NPR (blog),
Aug. 7, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/mxsbslq.
2 Paul Hockenos, “Street Smarts: From Holland, Bright Ideas for Highways,”
The New York Times, April 26, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/kmnfyqp.
3 Adrianne Jeffries, “Crazy plan to cover the nation’s roads with solar panels
raises $1 million,” The Verge, May 26, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/m3h78w9.
4 Hockenos, op. cit.
5 Ibid.
Transportation to demonstrate an automated vehicle and highway system. The
subsequent research and engineering
work culminated in a 1997 demonstration on Interstate 15 in San Diego in
which about 20 automated vehicles, including cars, buses and trucks, engaged
in platooning and other maneuvers, attracting considerable media coverage.
A subsequent initiative by the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) fostered another round
of research. In a 2005 DARPA “grand
challenge” competition, five autonomous
vehicles successfully navigated a 132mile course in southern Nevada. Two
years later, six teams navigated a staged
city environment in a DARPA urban
challenge competition.
“That first competition created a
community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers,
backyard mechanics, inventors and
dreamers who came together to make
history by trying to solve a tough technical problem,” said Lt. Col. Scott Wadle,
DARPA liaison to the U.S. Marine Corps.
“The fresh thinking they brought was
the spark that has triggered major advances in the development of autonomous robotic ground vehicle technology in the years since.” 29
As car manufacturers neared commercialization of semi-automated technologies such as front-end collision
avoidance systems, Google quietly developed fully automated vehicles. In a
2010 blog post, the company disclosed
July 25, 2014
639
FUTURE OF CARS
ifornia, Michigan and Washington, D.C.,
followed. The U.S. Department of Transportation in 2013 issued policy guidance on self-driving vehicles, including
recommendations for states related to
testing, licensing and regulation. “Whether
we’re talking about automated features in
cars today or fully automated vehicles of
the future, our top priority is to ensure
these vehicles — and their occupants —
are safe,” said then-Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. 32
AFP/Getty Images/Jewel Samad
that its self-driving cars had by then
traveled more than 140,000 miles, always with a person behind the wheel
who could take control if necessary.
The cars used video cameras, radar
and lidar to detect other vehicles, as
well as detailed maps to enable them
to navigate. “While this project is very
much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation
might look like in the future thanks
to advanced computer science,” the
President Obama rides in a high-tech smart car simulator at the Turner-Fairbank
Highway Research Center in McLean, Va., on July 15, 2014, before speaking on
the economy. Congress is deadlocked over how to pump more money into the
federal Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for bridge and road maintenance.
The Congressional Budget Office is warning that highway funds will dwindle to
$2 billion by Sept. 30, requiring the Transportation Department to begin delaying
payments to states to keep the balance above zero, as required by law.
post stated. 30 Since then, Google’s
cars have been involved in two accidents, although the company says the
technology was not at fault. One accident occurred while a human was
operating the car, and the other when
an automated car that was stopped at
a red light was rear-ended by a conventional car. 31
The reality that autonomous cars
could enter the market within a few
years jolted policy makers into action.
Nevada in 2011 became the first state
to pass legislation to regulate and license autonomous vehicles. Florida, Cal-
640
CQ Researcher
CURRENT
SITUATION
Regulatory Action
tate and federal policy makers are
just beginning to come to grips with
what new auto technology may mean.
“Michigan is the home of automotive technology, so we’re trying to stay
S
ahead of the curve,” says Kowall, the
Michigan state senator, who sponsored
the regulatory legislation his state adopted in December. “As of last count, we
have more than 300 companies in Michigan currently working on some type
of autonomous or connected vehicle
technology. We’re just making sure that
there are no encumbrances on companies that want to do this testing.”
About a dozen more states are
looking into the issue, prodded by
companies that want legal clarity when
putting a self-driving car on the road.
Automated cars generally are neither
explicitly permitted nor banned because legislators have not had to confront the issue. (See graphic, p. 628.)
“States have assumed in all the laws
they have written that there is a driver
in the car,” says Anne Teigen, a transportation expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Now that such an assumption is becoming outdated, policy makers face
questions including:
• Should operators of automated cars
get special training, ensuring that they
understand the technology and can take
over controls when necessary?
• If an automated vehicle is involved
in an accident, where does liability fall?
On the owner or operator? The manufacturer? Or the company that designed
a piece of software?
• If a state bans drivers from texting
or using a cellphone, should it make an
exception for drivers who are behind
the wheel of a self-driving vehicle?
• Should intoxicated people be allowed to operate a self-driving vehicle?
• If an automated car exceeds the
speed limit or violates other traffic laws,
can the operator be ticketed just like
the driver of a conventional car?
What makes these issues particularly challenging is the fast-changing
technology: Entire new capabilities may
emerge as a bill is being written. For
example, policy makers have debated
how to determine liability when a selfContinued on p. 642
At Issue:
Should states replace the gas tax with a tax on miles traveled?
yes
REP. EARL BLUMENAUER, D-ORE.
PHIL BYRD
SPONSOR, ROAD USAGE FEE PILOT
PROGRAM ACT
CHAIRMAN, AMERICAN TRUCKING
ASSOCIATIONS; PRESIDENT, BULLDOG
HIWAY EXPRESS
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2014
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2014
l
ast December I introduced a bill to raise the gas tax by
15 cents per gallon over three years and index it to inflation, restoring its lost purchasing power and providing the
revenue necessary to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent. A
gas tax increase offers an immediate fix to our short-term problem, but it is not the solution for the future.
It is critical that policy makers at the local, state and federal
levels prepare for a transition away from the gas tax. Due to
government-mandated fuel efficiency standards, the rising popularity of electric and hybrid vehicles and declining driving, all
of which are good things that lead to a cleaner environment
and more livable communities, the gas tax soon will no
longer be the best way to fund transportation.
That’s why I’ve introduced H.R. 3638, the Road Usage Fee
Pilot Program Act, which would provide funding for states to
run pilot projects to explore a transition to a vehicle-milestraveled (VMT) fee instead of a gas tax.
Oregon, which led the nation in 1919 with the first gas tax
to fund road construction, has been developing a VMT fee
alternative and has operated two pilot projects over the last
decade.
A VMT fee preserves the user-fee model that our transportation funding system has relied on since 1956, and is actually fairer. Right now, the road use of the Toyota Prius driver is partially subsidized by the driver of the less
fuel-efficient Ford F-150 pick-up.
The technology to implement a VMT is becoming standard
in many new cars and provides opportunities to create a uniform payment platform for a host of transportation needs:
parking, transit, Amtrak, bike share and car share. It can explain how to avoid the accident ahead, when the next bus or
ferry leaves and where to find the nearest vacant parking
space. This would make the entire transportation experience
seamless and more efficient.
While we must extend the gas tax for a few more years,
it’s clear that one form or another of VMT is the future. The
Oregon VMT pilot projects have shown that an alternative to
the gas tax is possible, practical and private. States are moving
forward with their own pilot projects, and I urge Congress to
encourage this progress by passing my legislation and laying
the groundwork for a transportation funding system that is
ready for the future, not rooted in the past.
t
here is no more crucial role for government than maintaining our nation’s roads and bridges. The American economy,
and a good part of the American experience, depend on
freedom to move safely and efficiently from place to place.
While it is certainly important for states to do their part to
fund maintenance and repair work on our roads and bridges,
we believe it is first and foremost the federal government’s
responsibility to fund these projects for the betterment of our
nation’s infrastructure and economy.
With the Highway Trust Fund strained due to lack of revenue,
some misguidedly believe we should scrap the fuel tax altogether
in favor of more radical approaches such as tolling or a vehiclemiles-traveled tax (VMT). This would be a catastrophic mistake
for our economy and for the transportation industry.
Both tolling and a VMT are wildly inefficient, which requires the tax to be much higher than it ordinarily would be.
Looking overseas to Germany, where trucks are subject to a
VMT — the most sophisticated tax of its kind at the moment
— the administrative overhead is 23 percent. That means for
every dollar collected, 23 cents goes not into asphalt and
concrete but into bureaucracy.
The fuel tax, however, puts 99 cents of every dollar into
construction. That’s a real value. And those dollars generate
economic growth. We know every $1 spent on infrastructure
generates nearly $2 in economic output in the first two years.
There’s no way to have a VMT without a massive new
bureaucracy. Today there are about 254 million registered
vehicles — all of which would have to have a tax collected
from them. For reference, the Internal Revenue Service
processes fewer than 150 million tax returns annually.
Beyond the efficiency issues, the VMT presents several
technical challenges — officials in Oregon concluded it would
take at least 20 years to implement statewide. The Oregon
pilot study also found the technology involved was unreliable,
inaccurate and expensive to maintain.
Many states have already raised their fuel tax — and there’s
been a bold proposal in Congress to raise the federal fuel tax
and index it to inflation to pay for our infrastructure needs.
The tax is not, as some say, a Democratic idea. Republican
icon Ronald Reagan raised the fuel tax. Leaders at all levels of
government should embrace the fuel tax as the best way to
fund infrastructure investment.
yes no
no
www.cqresearcher.com
July 25, 2014
641
FUTURE OF CARS
Continued from p. 640
the regulations are in place that would
keep the public safe but would not impede progress,” said DMV Deputy Director Bernard Soriano. 33
Because California requires that a driver be able to take over if necessary,
Google may have to modify its design.
“Google is going to have to manufacture those vehicles with steering wheels
and pedals,” Soriano said. 34
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last year is-
Getty Images/William Thomas Cain
driving car gets into an accident vs.
instances when the driver takes back
control of the automated car and then
gets into an accident. But in the case
of the prototype Google car unveiled
in May, a driver cannot take control
in a traditional sense because the vehicle lacks a steering wheel or brake.
“It’s difficult to regulate something
when legislators don’t know how it
will work because maybe even the
The I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington, Del., was closed
indefinitely in June after four support columns were discovered to be tilting.
Transportation experts say that because gasoline is taxed by the gallon, not price,
the growing popularity of more fuel-efficient cars makes it more difficult to collect
enough in gas taxes to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges. A mix of
traditional and automated cars on highways may further strain highway
infrastructure, as intersections and traffic light systems are
redesigned to accommodate the different types of vehicles.
manufacturers don’t know how it will
work,” Teigen says.
In California, officials at the Department of Motor Vehicles announced
several requirements for testing autonomous vehicles, including that selfdriving vehicles be registered, test drivers
complete a training program, and drivers
be capable of immediately taking control of the vehicle.
“Because of what is potentially out
there soon, we need to make sure that
642
CQ Researcher
sued guidance to the states, advising
them to require special training for operators who are testing autonomous
vehicles as well as to require manufacturers to share information about all
incidents or crashes. The agency also
warned that the vehicles were not yet
ready for public use.
“NHTSA does not recommend that
states authorize the operation of selfdriving vehicles for purposes other than
testing at this time,” the agency stat-
ed. “We believe there are a number
of technological issues as well as human
performance issues that must be addressed before self-driving vehicles
can be made widely available.” 35
Some in Congress also are flashing
a yellow light. “It’s hard for me to fathom a car in New York City being without a driver,” Rep. Albio Sires, D-N.J.,
said at a hearing last year on autonomous
vehicles. “I mean, it’s hard enough
with a driver.” 36
Automotive industry leaders, however, are urging policy makers not to slow
down the technology with burdensome
regulations. “Let the market work,” Mike
Robinson, General Motors vice president of sustainability and global regulatory affairs, said at the same hearing.
“Let manufacturers, like GM, do what
we do best and compete for customers
with features that add real value to the
drive today and to the future generations of vehicles tomorrow.” 37
But the manufacturers’ position may
be weakened by widespread criticism
of how slowly they have moved in
handling recent safety problems, including GM’s recalls this year of tens
of millions of vehicles, many because
of faulty ignition switches that sometimes prevented airbags from inflating,
causing at least 13 deaths. 38
U.S. policymakers also are under
pressure to help American companies
compete in the global marketplace.
Other countries are forging ahead with
self-driving vehicle technologies. Germany, Italy and France in May won
agreement to a little-noticed amendment to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic that would allow
self-driving vehicles, thereby helping
their high-end carmakers that are planning to bring autonomous vehicles to
market within a few years.
“The problem isn’t technology, it’s
legislation, and the whole question of
responsibility that goes with these cars
moving around . . . and especially
who is responsible once there is no
longer anyone inside,” said Carlos
Conference of State Legislatures.
Congress is deadlocked over how
to pump more money into the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Congressional Budget Office is warning that
highway funds will dwindle to $2 billion
by Sept. 30, requiring the Transportation Department to begin delaying
payments to states as early as next
month to keep the balance above
zero, as required by law.
Various stopgap measures have been
proposed in the House and Senate as
Even as officials at the state level
brace for the possible cutoff of money
from the federal Highway Trust Fund,
they have explored options to increase
revenue from state gas taxes. Several
states, including Colorado, Nebraska,
North Carolina Virginia, and Washington, have imposed fees on electric vehicles. Other states have authorized
studies of alternatives to the gas tax,
and the Oregon legislature last year
approved a pilot program under which
5,000 volunteer motorists will be able
Getty Images/Bloomberg/Patrick T. Fallon
Ghosn, head of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. 39
NHTSA is also addressing another
frontier in automotive technology:
vehicle-to-vehicle communication,
known as V2V. In February, the agency
announced it would begin to enable
the technology that allows vehicles to
communicate with each other, exchanging basic safety data such as
speed and position in order to avoid
accidents.
V2V technology is designed, at least
initially, to alert drivers to hazardous
conditions. But NHTSA is also considering links to automated technologies on board a vehicle, enabling it
to brake or swerve without the driver
taking action. The technology eventually could also link to infrastructure,
such as traffic lights.
“This is just the beginning of a revolution in roadway safety,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. 40
Highway Funding
ven as vehicles are improving, the
roads they are traveling over are
deteriorating, in part because of evolving vehicle design.
The growing popularity of more
fuel-efficient cars, especially those that
use hybrid or electric technology, makes
it more difficult for states to collect
enough in gas taxes to maintain roads
and bridges. Two other factors are
contributing to the funding crisis, according to analysts: People are driving
less and therefore buying less gasoline, and gas is taxed by the gallon
instead of the price — meaning that
gas tax revenue does not keep pace
with inflation. The federal gas tax,
which is 18.4 cents per gallon, has not
been raised since 1993. 41
“It’s fair to say that we are in a
well-documented and worsening
transportation funding crisis nationwide,” says Jaime Rall, transportation
program manager with the National
E
www.cqresearcher.com
Nissan’s autonomous concept car is shown by Executive Vice President Andy
Palmer in Irvine, Calif., on Aug. 27, 2013. Nissan plans to offer self-driving cars
by 2020. Other car companies are keeping pace with automated car technology,
including General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volvo and Mercedes.
well as by the Obama administration.
Congress continued to consider options as its month-long August recess
approached. 42
A few on Capitol Hill maintain that
a gas tax increase makes the most
sense. Last month, Sens. Bob Corker,
R-Tenn., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn.,
proposed raising the gas tax by 12 cents
per gallon and indexing it to inflation.
“Congress should be embarrassed
that it has played chicken with the
Highway Trust Fund and allowed it to
become one of the largest budgeting
failures in the federal government,”
Corker said. 43
to choose to pay a fee based on miles
driven instead of a tax on gasoline
used. (See “At Issue,” p. 641.)
These policies face opposition. Owners of fuel-efficient cars say it’s unfair
to penalize them for cutting their gas
use, and privacy advocates worry about
driving habits being tracked if they are
taxed on mileage.
In February, Democratic Virginia
Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed legislation
repealing that state’s $64 annual tax
on hybrid vehicles. “The way to improve our environment is not to tax
vehicle owners who are doing the
right thing,” said Democratic state Sen.
July 25, 2014
643
FUTURE OF CARS
Adam P. Ebbin, who introduced the
legislation. 44
OUTLOOK
Ubiquitous Taxis
utomotive experts foresee a time
when an automated car will
show up at the doorstep, transport a
person to the office and then head
off to drive someone else. Instead of
individually owned cars sitting in parking lots or garages most of the day,
automated cars could be in almost
continual motion, reserved by one
user after another. In theory, fewer cars
would be needed.
“It’s exactly like a taxi service except the expectation is that it should
be cheaper,” says entrepreneur Chase.
“You don’t have to maintain it, you
don’t have to park it, you don’t have
to deal with it.”
“Although demand can go up in
terms of usage, the utilization of vehicles will be completely different,”
says KPMG’s Silberg.
Google, in a potential signal that it
is anticipating a new model of car use,
surprised many observers by investing
some $258 million last year in Uber
Technologies, a company whose mobile apps run car services. 45 It marked
Google’s biggest-ever venture capital
investment and fed speculation that
the search engine giant is working not
A
just on new vehicle technology but
rather on a whole new approach to
how people get around.
Experts note that transforming
how vehicles are rented and used
will have implications for existing industries. Already, traditional taxi services and online alternatives such as
Uber and Lyft are squaring off over
regulations in several cities and states.
If society were to need fewer cars, the
future of the automotive industry could
be threatened.
“What scares the auto industry a lot
is that demand is going to go down,”
Silberg says.
A transition to greatly reduced car
ownership would have other profound
impacts on society. When cars are not
needed, they could be parked in peripheral parking lots miles from stores
or businesses, enabling developers to
convert parking areas around shopping
centers and in downtown areas for
other purposes.
“The real potential is for something
quite different: ubiquitous taxis — summoned via smartphone or weird glasses — that are so cheap they make car
ownership obsolete,” economics journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote last year.
“It explains why the same company
[Google] that’s invested in the technology to drive the cars is now investing in the technology to hail them.
. . . Cities based on cheap autonomous
cabs would be much greener than
today’s cities. Without the parking,
they’d also be denser and more productive, but people wouldn’t have to
sacrifice their large homes. It would
About the Author
David Hosansky is a freelance writer in the Denver area
who specializes in environmental issues. He previously was a
senior writer at CQ Weekly and the Florida Times-Union in
Jacksonville, where he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize. His previous CQ Researcher reports include “Wind
Power” and “Distracted Driving.”
644
CQ Researcher
be a true economic game-changer.” 46
Some experts, however, say the attachment of Americans to their cars will
not easily go away. After all, vehicles
are intensely personal for many drivers,
who express themselves by purchasing,
say, a European sedan or heavy-duty
pick-up truck, and using it as a mobile
den and storage area. “Automation may
enable a shift from car ownership,” says
Wallace at the Center for Automotive Research, “but it remains to be seen if people want that.”
Notes
1 Chris Urmson, “Just press go: designing a
self-driving vehicle,” Google Official Blog,
May 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/n6d53dj.
2 Lawrence Ulrich, “Feeling a Bit Obsolete
in the Driver’s Seat,” The New York Times,
Dec. 13, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/km35wvp.
3 Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,”
Google Official Blog, Oct. 9, 2010, http://tiny
url.com/38jnhnk.
4 Jason Mick, “Google’s Self-Driving Cars Are
a ‘Threat,’ Says GM,” Daily Tech, May 30, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/mo6pu5q.
5 “Self-Driving Car Test: Steve Mahan,” Google,
March 28, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/7xcsg56.
6 “The Road to Self-Driving Cars,” Consumer
Reports, April 2014, http://tinyurl.com/jwoaqrw.
7 Daniel J. Fagnant and Kara M. Kockelman,
“Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles,”
Eno Center for Transportation, October 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/lzrjmzl.
8 “Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Tests
Out Self-Driving Cars in Tokyo,” Agence FrancePresse, Nov. 9, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/kpcganw.
9 Lawrence Blincoe, et al., “The Economic and
Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2010,”
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
May 2014, http://tinyurl.com/n69u5pg.
10 Bryant Walker Smith, “Human Error as a
Cause of Vehicle Crashes,” Stanford University
Center for Internet and Society, Dec. 18, 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/phobdqm.
11 “An Analysis of the Significant Decline in
Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities in 2008,” NHTSA,
June 2010, p. 11, www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/
811346.pdf.
12 “Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Communications
for Safety,” National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, undated, http://tinyurl.com/
q8o4fja.
13 Fagnant and Kockelman, op. cit.
14 Joan Lowy, “Leaving the Driving to a Computer Has Big Benefits,” The Associated Press,
Oct. 23, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/pc2b7op.
15 Mark Harris, “FBI warns driverless cars could
be used as ‘lethal weapons,’ ” theguardian.com,
July 16, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/olx2z36.
16 Michael M. Grynbaum, “Gridlock May Not
Be Constant, But Slow Going Is Here to Stay,”
The New York Times, March 23, 2010, http://
tinyurl.com/pywlv8k.
17 Alexis Stevens, “Atlanta Snow Jam 2014:
Metro commuters recount their hours-long
trip home,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
Jan. 29, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/q2b38su.
18 2012 Annual Urban Mobility Report, Texas
A&M Transportation Institute, 2013, http://tiny
url.com/6scas.
19 Evan Ackerman, “Study: Intelligent Cars
Could Boost Highway Capacity by 273%,”
IEEE Spectrum, Sept. 4, 2012, http://tinyurl.
com/bs25a3u.
20 Aaron Smith, “U.S. Views of Technology
and the Future,” Pew Research Internet Project, April 17, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/mmpyf67.
21 Jim Gorzelany, “Most Consumers Say
They’ll Steer Clear of Self-Driving Cars, Survey Says,” Forbes, Sept. 23, 2013, http://tinyurl.
com/pndf87f.
22 Claire Cain Miller, “When Driverless Cars
Break the Law,” The New York Times, May 13,
2014, http://tinyurl.com/q2zt4k7.
23 Danielle Douglas and Michael A. Fletcher,
“Toyota reaches $1.2 billion settlement to end
probe of accelerator problems,” The Washington Post, March 19, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ko
592ww.
24 “Self-Driving Cars: Are We Ready?” KPMG,
2013, http://tinyurl.com/ovezqkv.
25 Alex Davies, “Self-driving cars will be a
huge deal for the elderly and handicapped,”
Business Insider, Aug. 29, 1013, http://tiny
url.com/pqqosva.
26 James Barron, “Cars and the City, Imperfect
Together,” The New York Times, March 19,
2010, http://tinyurl.com/pfr32x2.
27 “Early Adventures with the Automobile,”
EyeWitness to History, 1997, http://tinyurl.com/
rofv3.
28 For background, see Thomas J. Billitteri,
“Auto Industry’s Future,” CQ Researcher, Feb. 6,
2009, pp. 105-128.
29 “The DARPA Grand Challenge: Ten Years
www.cqresearcher.com
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Center for Automotive Research, 3005 Boardwalk, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48108;
734-662-1287; www.cargroup.org/. Studies the global automotive industry; formerly
associated with the University of Michigan.
Center for Auto Safety, 1825 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 330, Washington, DC
20009; 202-328-7700; www.autosafety.org. Consumer advocacy group that concentrates
on auto safety and defective automobiles.
Eno Center for Transportation, 1710 Rhode Island Ave., N.W., Washington, DC
20036; 202-879-4700; www.enotrans.org. Think tank that studies transportation issues;
funded by a foundation endowed by an early 20th-century traffic control pioneer.
Intelligent Transportation Society of America, 1100 New Jersey Ave., S.E.,
Washington, DC 20003; 800-374-3472; www.itsa.org. Advocates research, development and deployment of intelligent transportation systems.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1200 New Jersey Ave., S.E.,
West Building, Washington, DC 20590; 888-327-4236; www.nhtsa.gov. Federal
agency that regulates vehicles and funds highway safety programs.
Later,” Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency press release, March 13, 2014, http://
tinyurl.com/o2th4o6.
30 Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,”
Google Official Blog, Oct. 9, 2010, http://tiny
url.com/38jnhnk.
31 Jay Yarow, “Human driver crashes Google’s
self-driving car,” Business Insider, Aug. 5, 2011,
http://tinyurl.com/3lz9zpn; and John Markoff,
“Google cars drive themselves, in traffic,” The
New York Times, Oct. 9, 2010, http://tinyurl.
com/krbrzy2.
32 “Provides guidance to states permitting testing of emerging vehicle technology,” National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration press release, May 30, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/q8r9drs.
33 Justin Pritchard, “Google: We’re Building Car
With No Steering Wheel,” The Associated Press,
May 28, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/l3hcve8.
34 Paul A. Eisenstein, “Self-driving cars rewriting rules of the road,” CNBC, May 30, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/lzpgawg.
35 Peter Valdes-Dapena, “Gov’t proposes rules
for self-driving cars,” CNN Money, May 31, 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/oaoorxt.
36 Keith Laing, “Driverless cars approach the
starting line,” The Hill, June 24, 2014, http://
tinyurl.com/ml45uow.
37 Ibid.
38 Matthew Rocco, “GM’s top lawyer takes
heat over ignition-switch recall,” Fox Business,
July 17, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nbrmk9q; and
Nathan Bomey, “GM recalls another 8.4 million vehicles, most for ignition switch defect,”
Detroit Free Press, June 30, 2014, http://tinyurl.
com/ohyzaem.
39 “Self-driving cars may hit roads in 2018:
Renault-Nissan CEO,” Reuters, June 3, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/nydozw3.
40 Jerry Hirsch, “U.S. regulators plan car-tocar communications to prevent accidents,” Los
Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/
njcywvs.
41 “Highway History,” U.S. Department of
Transportation Federal Highway Administration, Oct. 17, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/23gt3vw.
42 Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, “House
Passes Interim Fix for Highway Trust Fund,”
The New York Times, July 15, 2014, http://tiny
url.com/qdpl2sn.
43 Brett Logiurato, “Two Senators Have a Very
Simple and Very Unpopular Idea for Saving
the Highway Trust Fund,” Business Insider,
June 18, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nqmokcb.
44 Patricia Sullivan, “Virginia legislators seek
to repeal hybrid tax,” The Washington Post,
July 1, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/ngv7n7v.
45 Ryan Lawler, “Uber Confirms That It Raised
$258M From Google Ventures And TPG,”
TechCrunch, Aug. 23, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/
nqx2uj6.
46 Matthew Yglesias, “Google and Uber Could
Transform America,” Slate, Aug. 29, 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/ph825pm.
July 25, 2014
645
Bibliography
Selected Sources
Books
Parissien, Steven, The Life of the Automobile, St. Martin’s
Press, 2014.
A British cultural expert carefully documents the history of
automobiles, dating back to the first cars in the late 19th
century. Parissien mixes compelling profiles of leading industry figures, descriptions of major U.S. and overseas car
models and a look ahead to the potential of alternative fuel
sources.
Articles
“The Future of Transportation,” Citylab, 2014, http://tiny
url.com/mbfzqqs.
With content sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation,
Citylab presents a series of thought-provoking articles and
essays by reporters and analysts about the future of urban
transportation. They include pieces about electric cars,
Google self-driving cars, connected vehicles and potential
changes in society’s approach to car ownership. The articles,
intermixed with others about mass transit, transportation apps
and highways, provide an in-depth view of the complex
transportation system.
Fisher, Adam, “Inside Google’s Quest to Popularize SelfDriving Cars,” Popular Science, Sept. 18, 2013, http://
tinyurl.com/lka692w.
A technology writer takes a detailed look at Google’s work
on self-driving cars. The article examines the potential benefits of autonomous cars, some of the key technical and legal
challenges and the uneasy relationship between Google and
carmakers.
Guizzo, Erico, “How Google’s Self-Driving Car Works,”
IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 8, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/3l4bvnz.
A short but detailed article explains the technology that
enables a Google car to drive itself.
Hirsch, Jerry, “U.S. regulators plan car-to-car communications to prevent accidents,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/njcywvs.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx discusses the potential benefits and challenges of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, as seen by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Hockenos, Paul, “Smart Streets: From Holland, Bright
Ideas for Highways,” The New York Times, April 26, 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/ngmosz7.
Dutch inventors and others have proposed many innovations for creating so-called smart highways that could better
charge electric vehicles, improve visibility and otherwise serve
the needs of motorists.
646
CQ Researcher
Miller, Claire Cain, “When Driverless Cars Break the
Law,” The Upshot, The New York Times, May 13, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/q84598m.
A technology writer analyzes one of the biggest barriers to
the mass marketing of autonomous vehicles: Who will be
held responsible when one of them gets into an accident?
The article looks at the legal ramifications.
Yglesias, Matthew, “Google and Uber Could Transform
America,”Slate, Aug. 29, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/ph825pm.
An economics writer contends that car-sharing with autonomous vehicles can reshape consumer attitudes toward
vehicles and also the urban landscape.
Reports and Studies
“2012 Annual Urban Mobility Report,” Texas A&M Transportation Institute, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/6scas.
The latest in a series of annual reports on urban congestion
provides detailed statistics on traffic in 498 U.S. urban areas,
with five large metropolitan areas — Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, New York-Newark and Boston
— experiencing the worst traffic. The report also measures the
degree to which certain trip times are unpredictable due to delays and includes an estimate of the additional carbon dioxide
emissions that can be attributed to traffic delays.
“Self-Driving Cars: Are We Ready?,” KPMG, 2013, http://
tinyurl.com/ovezqkv.
KPMG, a global auditing and professional-services company, conducted a series of focus groups to determine why
some people resist the notion of self-driving cars and what
could sway them to accept the technology. The key finding:
Consumers will be more receptive if autonomous cars can
safely deliver a more efficient and predictable driving experience. This report summarizes those focus groups and provides background about self-driving cars.
Fagnant, Daniel J., and Kara M. Kockelman, “Preparing
a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles,” Eno Center for Transportation, October 2013, http://tinyurl.com/lzrjmzl.
The Eno Center, a think tank focusing on the transportation industry, analyzes the prospects for autonomous vehicles. The report looks at potential benefits of the vehicles,
such as improved safety and reduced congestion, as well as
potential barriers to their adoption, such as cost and questions about liability. It concludes with a series of policy recommendations, including expanding federal funding for autonomous vehicle research; developing federal guidelines for
autonomous vehicle licensing and determining appropriate
standards for liability, security and data privacy. The Eno
Center was founded in 1921 by William Phelps Eno, who
pioneered the field of traffic management in the United States
and Europe.
The Next Step:
Additional Articles from Current Periodicals
Distracted Driving
“Editorial: Technology can distract drivers,” The Chicago
Tribune, Feb. 17, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/pr86wgw.
Because new technologies in cars, such as voice commands, are distracting to drivers, government watchdogs and
corporate innovators should work together to accelerate technological progress but also keep motorists safe, according
to a Chicago Tribune editorial.
Boudette, Neal E., “New Cars Are Becoming Mobile WiFi
Hotspots,” The Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2014, http://
tinyurl.com/qyxammy.
Automakers and major players in smartphones and apps are
integrating vehicle displays and output from apps more smoothly, so that smartphones can connect to the car automatically
and drivers do not have to take their hands off the wheel.
Shapiro, Gary, “Driverless cars can’t come soon enough,”
The Washington Post, April 23, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/
pu7jyt3.
The president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association says accidents due to driver distraction
are down because of new technologies such as lane-drifting
alarms, seat vibrators that warn drivers of impending danger, rearview cameras, adaptive cruise control and parallelparking assistance.
Highway Technologies
“Glow in the dark road unveiled in the Netherlands,”
BBC, April 14, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/lsqc7ge.
Researchers in the Netherlands are testing painted road markings that absorb daylight and can glow for up to eight hours
in the dark, serving as a sustainable alternative to streetlights.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles is drafting regulations for safely testing and driving autonomous vehicles.
Sullivan, Gail, “Google’s new driverless car has no brakes
or steering wheel,” The Washington Post, May 28, 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/k7w2ve8.
The safety director of Google’s self-driving car project says
the car’s safety features include two steering and braking
systems so that if one fails, the other can take over.
Traffic
Gaudin, Sharon, “University building simulated city to
test driverless cars,” Computer World, June 9, 2014, http://
tinyurl.com/ppbu9kq.
The University of Michigan is building a 32-acre simulated
city center where researchers and manufacturers will test
self-driving cars.
Newman, Daniel, “Why Google’s Driverless Cars Won’t
Solve Our Traffic Problems,” Gizmodo Australia, June 1,
2014, http://tinyurl.com/pdfc34a.
An Australian blogger says that because self-driving cars
could be bought as additional cars rather than replacing existing cars, they would add to traffic.
Zhang, Benjamin, “This Study Revealed The Staggering
Potential Of Self-Driving Cars,” Business Insider, June 2,
2014, http://tinyurl.com/osy478a.
Self-driving taxis could alleviate traffic in New York City,
optimize wait times and increase the utilization rate of cars,
which would lower costs and expand efficiency, according
to a study by the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
CITING CQ RESEARCHER
“Interactive city designs: smart highways, sustainable
dance floors,” CBC News (Canada), June 23, 2014, http://
tinyurl…
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