Will self-driving cars bring us a safer future on the roads? Not everyone is convinced

“You just get in the back seat. There’s a robot voice that says, ‘Please put on your seatbelt and get ready for the ride.’ And it just goes,” said Lindqwister, a data journalist for the San Francisco Standard, an online news organization.

Once it starts going, “it’s just a car that moves eerily slowly and carefully throughout the streets.”

But the reactions of people nearby seeing a car move with no one in the driver’s seat was “kind of a wild experience,” she told CBC Radio’s Spark.

That experience is gradually becoming far less unusual, at least in California. In August, the state expanded permits for two autonomous vehicle companies: Cruise, owned by General Motors, and Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet.

But after a handful of controversial incidents, Lindqwister said, you’ll find more polarized opinions about robotaxis in the city than neutral ones.

“People feel very strongly about them both ways, both supporting and completely against them,” she said.

In August — one day after California approved the expanded use of robotaxis — 10 of them ground to a halt on a busy San Francisco street, creating gridlock spanning several streets during a music festival.

Later that month, city officials claimed Cruise’s cars delayed an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient on its way to the hospital, and the patient later died.

The cases have raised questions about how safe autonomous vehicles really are at this stage in their ongoing development, and what regulations and even city planning would be required before they can become a fully integrated element of city roads around the world.

Training driverless cars on how to respond

Self-driving cars use a complex array of technology to function on city streets — from multidirectional cameras and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a laser scanning system that paints a digital map of the surrounding area, to artificial intelligence (AI) designed to make driving decisions on the fly.

Common situations such as stopping at a red light and staying in a lane may be relatively simple. But as anyone who’s driven through a city’s downtown core knows, a lot of other things may be happening at the same time.

“The world that we live in has sort of an infinite variety of objects. And, you know, people do crazy things sometimes,” said Steven Waslander, director of the Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory at the University of Toronto and an expert on autonomous vehicles.

“They’ll carry weird objects or they’ll make modifications to their vehicles. And these networks, if they’ve never seen those before, they don’t necessarily know how to respond.”

Waslander cited instances earlier this year of when Cruise cars in San Francisco drove into wet concrete and when they got caught up in police caution tape.

“Every time they get uncovered, you know, the team of engineers goes back and resolves that one. But there’s still a long list of these,” he said.

In a statement to Spark, Cruise said: “We’re always improving our technology and apologize to anyone inconvenienced by these incidents, but it is important that they are viewed against the deeply troubling status quo of injuries and road deaths in our cities” involving vehicles with drivers.

Autonomous vehicles “are still novel, and certain behaviour understandably attracts a lot of attention. But we’re proud of our safety record and remain committed to doing everything possible to make roads safer.”

Waymo did not respond to a request for comment.

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As self-driving cars become a reality, they open up an entire new world of transit possibilities. But when cars are connected online, there is the risk that they can be hacked, as can connected road and city infrastructure.

Can robotaxis make for better urban design?

Some experts say autonomous vehicles could best be used in cities that actively plan around their integration into its roads and surrounding infrastructure.

William (Billy) Riggs, director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative at the University of San Francisco, said that in the future, autonomous vehicles might help pave the way for “more multimodal cities,” which provide more space for pedestrians, cyclists and public transit alongside human-operated private vehicles.

He pointed to Portland, Ore., where he said the city’s Smart Autonomous Vehicles Initiative (SAVI) is exploring ways to test and implement their use. More robotaxis and similar ride-hailing AVs, for example, could mean a reduced need for parking — either along city streets or even at people’s homes.

“If we’re moving in a situation where you acquire a ride and you don’t own a car, you can actually … reuse that space in your garage for, you know, an extra bedroom, an accessory dwelling unit. You can use space on the street for parks, for planting, for water filtration,” Riggs said.

He also said cities in Germany, such as Frankfurt and Karlsruhe, are starting to introduce multi-person robotaxis that can carry six to eight people at a time — a little bigger than most cars, but smaller than a bus.

“It’s a new way of thinking about accessing a trip that is both reliable and convenient, and maybe not on a fixed route and not on a fixed schedule,” Riggs said.

Ultimately, the biggest barrier to robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles becoming a normal sight is public familiarity and trust.

Much of that will depend on whether companies building them can demonstrate they’re safer than cars driven by humans on average.

Waslander said AVs could make travelling easier for young children or people with physical disabilities, as well as generally safer, once the software running them becomes more sophisticated.

“I think we will see these benefits start to accumulate, but it is going to take some time,” he said.