EuroWire January 2015

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January 2015 25
“I think the industry is a little bit jittery,” Ms Stephens told
the Detroit Free Press. “They saw what happened to GM in
2014 and Toyota not too long ago.” As a result, she said,
automakers are probably erring on the side of being more
cautious than before.
Slow to warm to electric and hybrid
vehicles, Americans are eager for cars
that drive themselves – if only part-time
Some 55 per cent of American car buyers are very likely to
buy a partially autonomous vehicle: one that drives itself on
the highway or in tra c jams. 44 per cent would buy a fully
autonomous vehicle that does all the driving – and more than
20 per cent of those would pay an extra $4,000 for the feature.
These statistics, derived from a canvass of prospective buyers,
were provided by a speaker at the Society of Automotive
Analysts and Citi Research Automotive Investor Summit, held
9th October in South eld, Michigan. What they mean, said Xavier
Mosquet of Boston Consulting Group, is that if regulations
do not push the industry toward self-driving cars, customer
demand will.
Electric and hybrid vehicles were seen continuing their steady
but unspectacular advance. Itay Michaeli of Citi Research told
the Detroit-area meeting that EV/hybrids will rise from 3.6 per
cent of US vehicle sales in 2015 to nine per cent in 2020. And,
provided there is a major reduction in battery cost, Nissan North
America product planning director Ken Kcomt said he expects
global market share of all-electric cars to triple by 2025.
As reported by Detroit Free Press auto critic Mark Phelan,
speakers also said they expected electricity and weight
reduction techniques to increase as automakers and suppliers
gear up to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. (”Analysts
Praise Autonomous Vehicles, Fuel Saving Techs,” 10th October)
Other major developments projected from the platform include:
† A dramatic shift to nine and ten-speed automatic
transmissions over the next decade. (Borg Warner director of
investor relations Ken Lamb)
† Signi cant growth in the use of continuously variable auto-
matic transmissions as other automakers adopt the component
adopted by Nissan 20 years ago. (Nissan’s Mr Kcomt)
† Commercial use of 3D printing to make some vehicles and
parts. (Ravindra Kondagunta, CEO of TractionLabs)
† Only limited use of carbon bre in volume vehicles until
its price falls to $5-$8 from the $10 a pound it commands
today. (Ford Motor Co manager of global materials and
manufacturing research Matt Zaluzec)
A new ethicist
The car of the future will have near-perfect perception and
react from programmed logic. How will it decide who should be
saved?
Justin Pritchard, of the Internet-based technology news service
Phys.org, acknowledges the relative ease of writing computer
code that directs a self-driving car how to respond to an
emergency. The hard part, he said, is deciding what the response
should be. (“Self-Driving Cars: Safer – but What of Their Morals?”
19th November)
Today’s motorists make split-second decisions on the basis
of instinct and a limited view of a dangerous situation. Cars that
do most or all of the driving will improve on that, but accidents
will still happen.
Patrick Lin, a professor who directs the ethics and emerging
sciences group at California Polytechnic State University (San
Luis Obispo), told Mr Pritchard that companies testing driverless
cars are not focusing on accidents.
Those companies are, in Dr Lin’s view, shirking their duty to the
public. He told Phys.org he had discussed the ethics of driverless
cars with Google and automakers including Tesla, Nissan and
BMW. But, as far as he knows, only BMW has formed an in-house
group to study the issue of how a driverless car should perform
when things go badly wrong.
Dr Lin o ered an example of the complexity of the issue, which
can only intensify with the advance of technology. Consider
a driverless vehicle with in-car sensors so acute they can
distinguish between a motorcyclist wearing a helmet and a
companion riding without one.
If a collision is inevitable, should the car hit the person with the
helmet and a lower risk of injury? That would penalise prudence.
Phys.org’s Mr Pritchard noted that the company most
aggressively developing self-driving cars is not a carmaker at
all but the Internet services giant Google, which has invested
heavily in the technology it plans to introduce by 2017.
Google drivers, Mr Pritchard wrote, have covered “hundreds
of thousands of miles on roads and highways in tricked-out
Priuses and Lexus SUVs.”
But Google is focused on programming the cars to drive
defensively to avoid the instances when an accident is
unavoidable.
“People are philosophising about [the ethics element],” said
Ron Medford, the director of safety for Google’s self-driving
car project. “But . . . we really haven’t studied that issue.”
† One of the philosophers who is studying that issue is
Cal Poly’s Patrick Lin, who believes that decisions related
to programming “a machine that can foreseeably lead to
someone’s death” are among the most profoundly serious
that can be made. Said Dr Lin: “We expect those to be as
right as we can be.”
Like-minded people can be found at BMW’s group
technology o ce, a neighbour of Google’s in Silicon Valley.
Uwe Higgen, who heads up the unit, told Mr Pritchard that
the German automaker has brought together specialists
in technology, ethics, social impact, and the law to discuss
a range of issues raised by cars that take over the driving
chores from humans.
† To some, the fundamental moral area here is not the
rare catastrophic accident: it is the obligation to weigh
appropriate scepticism of driverless-car technology against
its potential to save lives. After all, Mr Pritchard reminded
his readers, more than 30,000 people die in tra c accidents
each year in the United States.
“No one has a good answer for how safe is safe enough,”
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor who has written
extensively on self-driving cars, told Phys.org. “[Self-
driving cars] are going to crash, and that is something that
the companies need to accept and the public needs to
accept.”