[Nfbv-announce] Fwd: Great Article About Autonomous Cars - Read in Preparation for Richmond Seminar

[Christopher Vinson]

Hello Virginia Federationists,




Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, was the first non-Google employee to
ride alone in the company’s gumdrop-shaped autonomous car. The ride was in
October 2015 in Austin. (Courtesy Waymo)

By Ashley Halsey III
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ashley-halsey-iii/> and Michael Laris
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-laris/>

Transportation <https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-commuting>

December 13, 2016

A blind man has successfully traveled around Austin — unaccompanied — in a
car without a steering wheel or floor pedals, Google announced Tuesday.

After years of testing by Google engineers and employees, the company’s new
level of confidence in its fully autonomous technology was described as a
milestone.

“We’ve had almost driverless technology for a decade,” said Google engineer
Nathaniel Fairfield. “It’s the hard parts of driving that really take the
time and the effort to do right.”

Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, was the first non-Google employee to
ride alone in the company’s gumdrop-shaped autonomous car.

“It is like driving with a very good driver,” Mahan said. “If you close
your eyes when you’re riding with somebody, you get a sense of whether this
is a good driver or whether they’re not. These self-driving cars drive like
a very good driver.”

Google says it has driven more than 2 million miles on public roads to test
its vehicles.

“In early 2015, we began to see some signs that we were getting close,”
Fairfield said. “The cars were going for longer and longer times without
the humans having to intervene.”

Fairfield said the company spent six months scrutinizing the vehicle’s
performance before Mahan was allowed to set out alone.

“That is a whole different beast — to get that driver out of the car, to
take off the training wheels,” Fairfield said.

Mahan said: “I had the greatest time driving around a neighborhood in
Austin, Texas. It was so much fun, being aware that the vehicle was
navigating intersections and I was in good hands, perfectly safe.”

The car Mahan rode in had a backup computer and multiple systems to control
it.

“If you removed the driver from the loop, you really have to have your
backups,” said Dmitri Dolgov, who heads technological development for
Google’s self-driving effort.

Mahan said: “This is a hope of independence. These cars will change the
life prospects of people such as myself. I want very much to become a
member of the driving public again.”

Google also announced Tuesday that it is spinning off its self-driving-car
project into a company called Waymo, an independent division under Google’s
parent company, Alphabet.

John Krafcik, chief executive of Waymo, said the Austin solo ride is an
indication that “we’re close to bringing this to a lot of people.”

Costa Samaras, an automation expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said the
move by Waymo “puts a marker down that says to Uber, Lyft and auto
companies that the race to capture market share in driverless mobility has
begun in earnest.”

Samaras said that “without a human in the loop, there’s also now a lot less
room for computer error in case something goes wrong. I’m guessing Waymo
has run these numbers and is betting on the computer.”

Google was among the first technology companies to plunge into an area
traditionally dominated by automakers in Detroit and elsewhere in the
world. After initial testing by its employees, the company embraced a
decision to put fully autonomous cars on the road — probably without
steering wheels or floor pedals — from the outset. In that decision, Google
became an outlier, as the existing industry, mindful of its need to sell
cars each year, took an approach intended to introduce self-driving
features incrementally.

The Google announcement came on a day when the Obama administration
proposed a rule that would require all new cars to be able to communicate
with other cars wirelessly, a move that advocates said could save lives but
that also raises privacy and hacking concerns among opponents.

The wireless box could, for instance, tell a car to brake when another
vehicle is about to run a red light. Federal officials said the required
technology “will not collect, broadcast or share information linked or
linkable, as a practical matter, to individuals or their vehicles.”



Tracy Soforenko

President, National Federation of the Blind of Virginia

202 285-4595 <(202)%20285-4595>

Tracy.soforenko at gmail.com