Cars, Engineering and Other Ramblings: Autonomous Cars

Bob Lutz of Chrysler & GM Leadership Fame - "It's all over for [car] brands and driving pleasure."

I attended Bob Lutz's Keynote Address at the 2018 SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) World Congress on April 11, 2018. Bob Lutz has marketed himself as a Car Guy in recent books, interviews and self-written articles in Road & Track magazine, and from what I saw I believe him. Mr. Lutz prefaced his speech by saying he didn't want to depress the young engineers in the room, but that in the future the era of "downshifting into the passing lane and throttling past traffic is coming to an end," and that, "soon autonomous cars will be mandated and human-driven vehicles will be outlawed... perhaps first in urban areas, then eventually into the suburbs and finally in rural America too." I'm paraphrasing from my notes here, but the gist was that a depressing, boring future is coming. No more human-driven cars allowed, with manual shifting and right-foot-driven high horsepower machines being corralled into private tracks. Screw that.

In a future era of self-driving cars, human-driven cars will be outlawed. No more granny shifting or double clutching.

Is it possible that human-driven cars will be outright banned in the future? I think so, but maybe not for the obvious reason of improved safety but rather something more sinister. Trolling. Humans will inevitably troll autonomously driven cars or game the system to speed up commute times by weaving in and out of traffic - think: brake checking autonomously driven cars to force them to a stop or causing an autonomous car to drive off the road. There's really no way to stop this from happening, other than banning human-driven cars.

"Are they [autonomous cars] going to be fun? Absolutely not." - Bob Lutz. But maybe less scary than whatever that Ford Escape is doing above.

Then there's the fuel savings or "green" benefit of a platoon of autonomously driven cars following in a sort of road-train down the highway to save energy. Perhaps energy-progressive states like California or traffic-conscious metropolis areas like Boston-NYC-Philadelphia will mandate autonomy to be green and/or ease congestion. Whatever the scenario, there's a time or fuel savings to autonomous cars, which means money. Money is a great motivator for innovation and laws alike.

"Platooning, autonomous cars in right lane only" will eventually turn into all lanes only, and forever.

So maybe mandated autonomous driving is a ways off, but what has the trend been? Smaller engines, but bigger cars. Less manual transmissions, more boring CVTs (continuously variable transmissions). Fun and funky popup headlights gave way for whatever the hell the Nissan Juke's pedestrian crash-safety-approved front end is. Efficiency, economy, the nanny state saying you can't do that. In the words of Bob Lutz, "Do you really care who (what company) made the subway car you're on?" - The future is a sea of beige autonomous pods on wheels.