Autonomous Cars are Here
Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car and how it will Reshape our World by Lawrence D. Burns
My coffee cup rating:
☕️☕️☕️☕️☕️
I’ve long been an advocate for autonomous vehicles, for they will help make the road much safer and more efficient place. Apart from some of my own research and random news stories though, I was in the dark about the history behind the technology. Autonomy: the quest to build the driverless car by Lawrence D. Burns pulled back the curtain of my ignorance and helped me see this technology in a new light. Burns starts his book with this quote, which you could say becomes a theme for the book.
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
Burns started his career at General Motors, where he stayed for three decades eventually becoming corporate vice president of research, development, and planning. His background in the industry brings a weight and professionalism needed to effortlessly explain the stories he presents.
As most of the world, including the major car companies, we're thinking this technology was still decades away, a small team of super genius’ started quietly working to prove them wrong. DARPA or the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was the first to challenge these bright minds to create driverless cars that would compete in a set of races in 2004, 2005 and 2007. Those first robot cars helped lay the foundation for the eventual autonomous race that we are currently living in today.
Two of the biggest characters in the autonomy story have been Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. In 2009 they started the self-driving startup Chauffeur [now called Waymo]. Their story respectively consumes a large part of the book for they are much of the reason autonomous cars have come as far as they have today. Burns takes a personal approach in sharing this story as he started consulting for the Chauffeur program in 2011. A position he still holds today [as of this writing]. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is related to how much this technology will save time, money, and space. Burns with a college from GM crunched the numbers on how much disruption autonomous cars could make on our future economy. What they found was astonishing. They concluded that drivers could save about $5,625 dollars a year by using an autonomous ride-sharing service. All by using just 15 percent of cars currently operating in a number of U.S. cities they studied. Not only are autonomous cars safer [up to 90 percent safer than a human driver based on predictions from many safety experts] but they will be way cheaper to use. With these revelations in hand, Burns started lecturing and telling anyone who would listen about the positive effects this tech could truly have. These revelations would fall mostly on deaf ears until eventually, companies like GM and other major car manufacturers started to take notice and began investing.
This book also highlights quite a few missed steps from GM. They had an opportunity to be leaders not only in the autonomous race but the EV race well. A great example of this was the project car GM created called the EV-1. It was a fully electric vehicle capable of going around 50 miles on a single charge. An impressive number for the time. But after just a few years of leasing these vehicles, GM closed the program, took all the cars back and destroyed them. This created a public outcry because people really loved these cars, including some high profile celebrities. The reason the cars got the ax according to Burns was they were just way too expensive to make. And as it was new tech, they wanted to be cautious about safety, so they took the vehicles back and destroyed them. As Burns describes this was a big mistake for GM and has haunted them for many years. For if they'd continued the program, they would have had about five years of development time on any other electric competition, including Tesla. As I’ve seen the somewhat negative documentary created about the EV-1, I’m glad Burns added this story to the book as I enjoyed hearing his perspective on what happened.
Overall, this book is a great first-hand account documenting the last ten years of autonomous car technology and its advancement. I feel much more educated, confident and excited about autonomous cars than ever before. My only quibble with the book is I wish Burns gave more insight into his thoughts and predictions on what the next ten years will look like for the industry. As I left the final chapter, I felt like needed to go research what the near future holds for this technology. Which, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
For anyone who is on the fence about the safety or reliability of autonomous cars, please read this book. It will open your eyes to see just how advanced this tech already is, and how much it will truly revolutionize the way we get around.
More Resources:
Author’s Website: Lawrence D. Burns
Google’s Self Driving Car Company: Waymo
EV-1 Documentary: Who Killed the Electric Car?