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Monster Truck II

I am a technologist by profession. Here are some things that come to my mind --Qatar cyber attacks, viruses, algorithmic trading bugs (causing a firm to almost go bankrupt), crashing/frozen apps, malfunctioning chips that crashed a car some years ago (may they rest in peace).


Good article and raise to the auto dealers for this invention. People will be safer with a car that puts safety first. My area has seen a rash of cars driven into buildings by older drivers who mistakenly hit the gas instead of the brake or who have a medical instance and react poorly. Hopefully these new vehicles will prevent such occurrences.

Ohio in reply to WT Economist

Perhaps, but a car with a good suite of sensors could probably do a better job today than most human drivers, because of the improved reaction time and the quality of the attention paid. The rationale for autonomous vehicles isn't how good they will be piloted in any absolute sense. The rationale is how much of an improvement an autonomous vehicle would be over a human-piloted one.


If you were to do even a preliminary study of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), you would think if we really need to add these mind boggling technologies into the cars.

PRT is a far simpler, safer and cheaper concept for automatic cars. PRT will also reduce traffic congestion and increase the average speed of travel (how about 100 miles per hour?).

See www.skytran.us.


For an economic publication, you seem to pay surprisingly little attention to the economic effects of self-driving cars.

Let's assume they work (a fair assumption, since it now depends on software progress, which can go much faster than hardware), and imagine a world with only robot cars.

- no more traffic jams
- no more car crashes
- no more car insurance
- no more court cases about car crashes
- no more ambulance chasers for car crashes
- 50% of emergency room activity in hospitals disappears
- massive savings on health care
- very significant effect on car use (move from 5% to say 50 or 80% of time) - effect on manufacturing of cars?
- very significant effect on car turnover, and technological development cycles in cars (now very slow)
- ability to do very different things in a car (sleep, eat, drink (!), work, watch TV, have sex,...)
- no more need for parking space?
- no more taxis? no more public transport?

The changes are as profound as those when we moved from horses to cars. Many, many benefits - makes one wonder what the drawbacks will be, other than the massive job losses/displacements through creative destruction.

D. Sherman

I loved this "brilliant" idea: "If other cars do not swerve or brake to avoid it, it is more likely to be a plastic bag than a rock". In other words, the robotic car will only be able to make intelligent decisions if all the other cars around it are driven by actual humans. What happens when most of the cars are driven by software and they're all trying to get cues from the other robotic cars around them? It seems to me we've already seen the results of this sort of thing with automatic Wall Street trading programs. The difference is that a stock market crash, unlike a car crash, doesn't kill anyone.

Re: "This means 140 professional drivers out of job."
Technology will, over the next say 50-100 years, rapidly reduce the need for labor in manufacturing and many service businesses. This will benefit people by reducing product and service costs, improving quality, enabling more customization, reducing waste, etc. Increased leisure should also be a blessing rather than a curse.
The problem to address is: how does an economy work when the value of labor declines to zip. I for one would love to see The Economist address this topic.

Alex Aoude

This could have a lot of good advantages. Yes, you can take the bus and have that "drive-less" ride but you will have to respect wherever the bus goes, and its time it passes.
Blind people would be able to move around easier, no more accidents, less traffic, no more drunk driving... sounds a bit too good to be true!
Assurance companies won't probably like this idea, the same way petroleum companies didn't like the hybrid car idea, but this is technology that will have to happen one day.

Reluctant Polluter

This means 140 professional drivers out of job. I'm not sure that in the long run the move to remove (or call it the drive to drive away) humans from behind the wheel will result in that much benefit.
What will you do with all the taxi drivers and their families families, put them on Google or Toyota dole? The argument of re-training doesn't work here - taxi driving is an emergency job, there are thousands of trained and qualified specialists who drive taxis because they weren't able to find employment in their professional field in the first palce.
Yeah, I know, that sounds a little bit Luddite, but I just imagine a monumental carnage on the road full of driverless vehicles in a case of glitch in one or more of electronic gadgets those cars are packed with. My personal several years experience with a highly computerized car (Prius) against a no-frills manual gearbox Nissan (and Volvo, built 1967, and...) cries for the latter. It's all about who's driving.
I mean, a shithead will manage to kill someone in a very high-tech manner, don't you worry.


Thinking about interaction between an automatic Car and humans has never been easy and simple to predict. Even not a simulation software, in it's full capacity, can claim to produce real conditions of traffic, leaving the situations in developing countries apart. Parameters like distance and time headways, speed of vehicles in front and rear, etc. are very much in use in those softwares. The effects vanish soon once the lanes are erased, or these softwares are asked to perform when one vehicle, let's say driven by a human, gets off the lane. It is worthwhile to note that traffic is complex and hard to decode, not impossible though. Yet no one has fully understood the very nature of it despite modelling it thorough multifaceted core models. Nonetheless, an intersting and very intriguing aspect is coming to change our daily life. It claims to do so at least.

Re manufacturing outsourced to China

Most of manufacturing jobs lost over the last say 50 years have been lost to technology not outsourcing. In fact some manufacturing jobs are already leaving China and moving to largely automated facilities to save shipping costs and time. With digital manufacturing and 3-D printing the pace of labor reduction will increase rapidly.

Re your point of reduced labor costs - do you really really really want everyone to pay more for everything to support uncompetitive labor?

The value and amount of labor needed will continue to decline. It's past time to start thinking about the impact of this.

I agree that changes are inevitable... but even incremental changes should keep in mind how to mitigate their negative impact. For the time being I see a rash for modernity with not a thought given to 'human waste'.
When all manufacturing is outsourced to China, it doesn't indicate reduced need for labor, just the reduced cost of labor.

J Rawlins

As a cyclist, it hard to know which is the more worrying thought: is the car zooming up behind me being driven by someone who is also reading his email; or is it being driven by a computer that is busy scanning for other cars - but not cyclists.


Two points, first a cheaper option is public safety campaigns, drivers ed courses, and taking away licenses from repeat offenders. This can work in all countries regardless of wealth.

Second point, bad GPS data. Chicago has north and south streets, neighboring suburbs often don't; a real estate ad this morning said "North Ridge" in Evanston, but Evanston doesn't have N-S streets. I'd like to see the map people drive to the "East" streets in Evanston; they are located somewhere in Lake Michigan.

There are parts of Chicago where on-line mapping services (Google & Mapquest, Bing) and GPS systems get really confused or even say that street doesn't exist; particularly areas near suburban boundary lines. My GPS says on the Kennedy expressway "keep left", why? It wants me to use the express lanes even if I don't want to or if they are even open at that time of day.

There are some roads I prefer and others I avoid like the plague because of traffic but my GPS doesn't care what I want. No I never want to take Dempster Street because of traffic but the GPS really doesn't like Golf Road which is parallel to it.

Just getting the mapping programs and computers accurate is a massive constantly changing problem. Technology can help save lives but in most parts of the world public safety campaigns are a faster and cheaper option.

Risk Warning System

Roads are not just for vehicles, what about the motorcycles in the roads, can they be driverless? If no then you should ban them driving in these roads, so what, new motorcycle roads must be constructed. So much investment is needed. What if there is a gap in front of the car. 3G video call is invented but very few people are using it because they don't want to be seen while talking. What about sports car manufacturers. Driving is not just a need to reach somewhere,it is a passion for some people. Driverless cars would be good for blind or disabled people, also long way drivers but no good for people who like to drive. I believe not fully autonomous cars but half autonomous cars (where the car will warn you for every accidental risks) will be used in the near future.

AlienStudentVIE in reply to Ohio

Even if carmakers succeed in developing av's that are way saver than conventional cars, i believe most people would feel more secure in the latter. It is the same story with airplanes: statistics proof they are saver but because the individual cant affect the outcome of an incident we tend to worry more, although it is a 1000 times saver. Unless theres a law to obligate avs demand will turn to human-piloted ones


Driverless cars will be safer for pedestrians and everyone. There will be no geezer drivers, no drunks, no texting drivers, no sleepy drivers, no distracted drivers, etc. Driverless cars will have better situational awareness, faster reaction times, and better control of speed.

And as a side benefit it will be great fun to watch the Teamsters choke and gag on this technology.

Reluctant Polluter in reply to Ohio

Actually, the notion of private car doesn't need all those "working place" justifications.

Private car means freedom - going when and where you wish to. Not to be dependent on routs and schedules of public transport.

"...over 30 million current workers will become free to pursue other jobs, thus increasing overall production in America."
More like increasing the problem of unemployment and putting additional pressure on the social safety nets. Remind yourself of how many jobs have gone already, and how many have been created.
Your fantasy world is from (and for) comic books.


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