Mike Swords of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator purposefully stepped in front of the self-driving mini-bus doing circles around an empty parking lot in the rain.
Quickly sensing the pedestrian, the on-board cameras relayed a signal to the autonomous vehicle’s computer, which told its brakes to engage. The bus stopped immediately and no one was injured.
“We haven’t seen any dead bodies out here so far,” joked an engineer with EasyMile, the maker of the 12-passenger autonomous vehicle making a stop in Los Angeles on Monday as part of a multi-city promotional tour.
About 60 business folks, city officials, urban planners and entrepreneurs met at the LACI innovation campus to take a test ride and tackle how to break down barriers preventing autonomous vehicles from entering the real world, from a public skeptical over safety to onerous regulations from government bureaucracies.
“It doesn’t drink and drive. And it doesn’t text and drive,” said Paul Brubaker, CEO of the Alliance for Transportation Innovation 21, the nonprofit from Washington, D.C., putting on the demonstration. Riding in the vehicle with Brubaker was Hasan Ikhrata, executive officer of the Southern California Association of Governments and Fred Walti, president and CEO of LACI.
At a roundtable later that morning, Brubaker said a world of computerized cars will save thousands of lives each year from traffic collisions because computers are immune to driver behavior that causes accidents.
“We lose 35,000 lives on the nation’s highways every year and 94 percent are caused by human error,” he said.
Last summer, a Tesla electric Model S running in a partially self-driving mode crashed in Florida, resulting in the death of the driver, when the car failed to stop after a truck turned in front of it. After the crash was reported in the media, the incident raised public safety concerns over autonomous vehicles.
Jennifer Cohen of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, speaking at the conference, said cities have a steep learning curve. They must figure out how to stripe roads, crosswalks and hang signs that AVs can read. “At this point in time, our law enforcement doesn’t know how to pull over an AV,” she told the group.
But Brubaker said regulators can’t apply a perfection standard to any technology, saying there would be accidents and even deaths with autonomous vehicles, but drastically fewer than occur today with human-driven cars.
The group took the self-driving bus on the first leg of a one-year tour through Sarasota, Florida; Atlanta; New Orleans; and Arlington, Texas, before it came to Los Angeles. The goal is to show off this existing technology to the public and make them comfortable with it.
“Go kick the tires. Experience it. We want to hear concerns,” Brubaker urged the group, acknowledging that baby boomers are leery of computerized technology, unlike millennials who embrace it.
“I don’t think Stanley Kubrick did us any favors when Hal refused to open the pod bay doors,” he said, referring to the chilling scene of a rogue computer that turns on an astronaut in the 1968 sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Ikhrata believes self-driving vehicles will queue up tighter on roads and freeways, adding capacity. “Plus when you own this car you drive less,” he said. He predicts fewer emissions and less smog, especially if most autonomous vehicles are electric.
Options for seniors losing the ability to drive and the disabled will improve, proponents said.
“I have a 16-year-old on the autism spectrum,” Brubaker told the group. “He’s never going to drive a car but an AV would allow him to get to job training because he can summon transportation.” Seniors can order a self-driving van and at a lower cost to cities and counties, he said.
The alliance is asking the Department of Transportation to consider a nationwide, autonomous vehicle plan so there is one set of regulations.
Brubaker said some federal and state rules are hindering their deployment, putting the United States behind other countries. EasyMile is operating its EZ10 in Singapore as well as Europe and the Middle East. On Wednesday, it will roll out a contract for two shuttles with Bishop Ranch, a large business park in Contra Costa County.
The state Department of Motor Vehicles is working on developing regulations for using AVs on roadways.
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