Clean, safe and it drives itself
The Economist, April 20th, 2013 – 657 words
SOME inventions, like some species, seem to make
periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed
between Karl Benz began small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the
breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into
the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape.
By putting production of the Model T on moving assembly lines set into the
floor of his factory in Detroit, Ford drastically cut the time needed to build
it, and hence its cost. Thus began a revolution in personal mobility. Almost a
billion cars now roll along the world’s highways.
Today the car seems poised for another burst of
evolution. One way in which it is changing relates to its emissions. As
emerging markets grow richer, legions of new consumers are clamouring for their
first set of wheels. For the whole world to catch up with American levels of
car ownership, the global fleet would have to quadruple. Even a fraction of
that growth would present fearsome challenges, from congestion and the price of
fuel to pollution and global warming.
Yet stricter regulations and smarter technology are making
cars cleaner, more fuel-efficient and safer than ever before. China, its cities
choked in smog, is following Europe in imposing curbs on emissions of noxious
nitrogen oxides and fine soot particles. Regulators in most big car markets are
demanding deep cuts in the carbon dioxide emitted from car exhausts. And
carmakers are being remarkably inventive in finding ways to comply.
Granted, battery-powered cars have disappointed. They
remain expensive, lack range and are sometimes dirtier than they look—for
example, if they run on electricity from coal-fired power stations. But car
companies are investing heavily in other clean technologies. Future motorists
will have a widening choice of super-efficient petrol and diesel cars, hybrids
(which switch between batteries and an internal-combustion engine) and models
that run on natural gas or hydrogen.
Meanwhile, a variety of “driver assistance”
technologies are appearing on new cars, which will not only take a lot of the
stress out of driving in traffic but also prevent many accidents. More and more
new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in
steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Some carmakers are
promising technology that detects pedestrians and cyclists, again overruling
the driver and stopping the vehicle before it hits them. A number of firms,
including Google, are busy trying to take driver assistance to its logical
conclusion by creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination
without a human at the controls. This is where it gets exciting.
Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that
driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may
be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff along
Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a
driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be
accepted by drivers, in stages.
As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate
their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory
for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes
that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which
is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving
it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting.
Some carmakers think this vision of the future is
bunk. People will be too terrified to hurtle down the motorway in a vehicle
they do not control: computers crash, don’t they? Carmakers whose self-driving
technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits,
and be put off continuing to develop it. Yet many people already travel,
unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with
those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place
gradually.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire