LAST week found me barrelling along the interstate behind the wheel of a turbodiesel Mercedes-Benz EClass, headed towards the beardy and heavily tattooed epicentre of the hipster universe, Portland, Ore. I was, as they say, putting a bird on it.
Sadly, roughly 2.5 billion other drivers seemed to have had the same idea, and as I approached the city sometimes known as Stumptown, traffic coagulated into the sluggish crawl that's familiar to any resident of the Lower Mainland. No problem - I set the cruise control, pushed my seat back, cracked open a bottle of water and stared out the side window at the riverside scenery.
Now I know what you're thinking: isn't this part of some old urban myth about the guy in the Winnebago sticking the cruise on and then going in the back to make a sandwich? In that hoary old tale, the 'bago leaves the road at speed, and then the lawyers get involved.
However, in this case, the Merc' I'm auto-piloting comes equipped with a selfsteering mechanism that's fully functional below 28 kilometres per hour. It's also equipped with an excellent radar-guided cruise-control system that actually monitors two cars ahead to assist with smooth acceleration and braking inputs, and it can stop the car entirely if need be.
If you're stationary for more than three seconds the system kicks off, but in the slowly bunching Slinky making its way into Portland, the car happily drove itself for 10 kilometres.
Quite literally, this is the least engaging driving experience I've had all year, and simultaneously one of the coolest.
Earlier this week, Nissan announced their intention to sell a fully autonomous car by 2020 - they've a prototype already functional and are just working out the kinks. Google has already made waves with their numerous self-driving camera cars roaming around California. Last year, a fully selfdriven Audi TT raced up the challenging Pikes Peak course just a few minutes off the pace of the top human drivers.
If you want to know what the next thing coming down the pipeline is, it's automotive autopilot. And the challenges aren't going to be electronic.
Let's suppose you're on a passenger airliner and your pilot gets up to use the washroom, leaving the plane set on automatic. How comfortable are you? Still happily munching away? Those pretzels makin' ya thirsty, but not another care in the world? Now transpose the same situation where you're on a long-haul Greyhound bus and the driver squeezes back through the rows to answer a call of nature. How tightly do you grip your armrests until he gets back? Acceptance of these technologies is going to be one of the biggest hurdles for the self-driving car to clear. Imagine steeling yourself as a pedestrian at a crosswalk. Naturally, the Vancouverite thing to do is merely stride out without looking as if you were made of depleted uranium, but let's pretend you at least make the effort to establish eye contact with the driver and receive some sort of indication that it's OK to cross. How long are you going to be there if everyone's cruising around reading the newspaper? Then there's the legislative side of things. While Google trumpets a perfect safety record - only one crash recorded and it was when a human pilot took over the controls - and while human beings seem perfectly satisfied with the current state of affairs where somebody's getting mowed down every five minutes or so, just wait until the first time a self-driven car kills or injures someone. It'll happen too, these things are machines and machines are imperfect because they're built by humans, who are REALLY imperfect.
In a civil lawsuit against a distracted driver who killed or maimed the plaintiff, the damages could amount to millions. They might take someone's house, their property, drain their bank account. Now consider the legal battles involved if a self-driving Nissan clips an inattentive cyclist. It'd make the O.J. Simpson trial look like an episode of The People's Court.
Then there's the tricky issue of how to deal with the fact that people are jerks when they get behind the wheel. A meekly programmed autonomous car must be engineered to give way and keep a safe driving distance, so what does it do if a swervin' Mervin comes along and carves up traffic? Guys in high powered Audis would be going through traffic like a cheetah through a pack of gazelles.
That's all the bad stuff, but there's plenty that is good about the idea of a self-driving car. As much as automotive writers praise a machine for drawing you into the experience, for thrilling and rewarding and engaging the driver, most people want boring, reliable transportation. Many commuters must feel like they're wasting their lives in traffic - what if they could claw a little of that time back in office work or even just kicking back with a coffee? What if your crappy post-Friday commute back over the Lions Gate Bridge was a chance to look around and find yourself atop one of the most scenic bridges in the world - you could take up photography. What if you could have your car drop you off out front of Park Royal around Christmastime and then tell it to go find its own parking? It's a long way off, that's for sure, but here, outside Portland, after a long day behind the wheel, I was only too happy to let somebody else drive for a bit. And, after a while, the traffic cleared up, and away we went. After 130 years of the internal combustion, Mercedes has just reinvented the horse. An electronic coachman can't be far behind.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @brendan_mcaleer.
