Why self-driving cars really aren't "just around the corner".

In light of the news this month that London is going to start allowing fully autonomous drone cars to be tested from 2015, I thought it was worth rehashing some of the finer points of why these cars are not "just around the corner".
We'll concentrate on one particular car here - the Google self-driving car - simply because they're further along than anyone else.
The biggest single issue facing drone cars is really simple : they don't have quantum artificial intelligence. They can't deal with unpredictable situations, so they rely on meticulously collected information from (human-driven) scanner cars that analyze the route ahead of time. Think Google Street View, but a thousand times more detailed, mapped with cameras that photograph every sign, and laser scanners (LIDAR) that maps every bump and crevasse. So every time you see a video of a self-driving google car, you need to understand that thousands of intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. And because a laughably tiny number of roads in the U.S. have been analysed at this level to allow autonomous car use, essentially if you take a google car off-campus, it's a very expensive paperweight.
Tied to the unpredictability part of that are three other factors - weather, construction, and humans. Drone cars are currently so stupid that they can't even drive in rain, let alone ice or snow. Google have so much trouble with rain in particular that they haven't even reached the testing stage yet. The reason is simple : to a human, rain makes things look wet. To a computer synthetic vision system, they might as well be driving on Mars.
Remember I said how much work goes into mapping a road for a Google car to drive on? Go and park a utility truck in the inside lane and put some cones out. Voila. One incapacitated self-driving car. Because the truck and cones weren't there when the road was mapped, the car can't handle it. The same goes for potholes and open manhole covers - the car will just drive straight over (or into) them. Some changes can be handled, obviously. Google's cars look for things like stop signs - even in unexpected places - and react accordingly. At least that's the theory. They also look for pedestrians and other traffic all the time, so missing one stop sign shouldn't be a problem right?
If we welcome pesky humans into the equation, things change radically. As Google says, "Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels, meaning that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop". Similarly it has trouble with pedestrians who don't use crosswalks (ie. all of them) and people standing in the road where they shouldn't be.
So whilst headline-grabbing mayors and confused mainstream newspaper editors may have everyone believing they'll be able to go out and buy a self-driving drone this Christmas, it simply isn't the case and won't be for probably another 10 years.

Drivers who are scared of acceleration.

I read a great article by Neil DeGrasse Tyson a few weeks ago about how you can't 'feel' speed, and that drivers who "love speed" really love acceleration - the forces they feel through accelerating and braking, lowered suspension and cornering forces. That's me - I love all those things and I understand the limits of my car and its tyres. I know where all four corners are, I know how wide it is and I know how quickly it'll stop (that last one is pretty important). Sadly, where I live (Utah) it would seem I'm one of only three people who are in this category. For as far as I can tell, everyone else is so deathly afraid of feeling any sort of g-force that they'll do anything to prevent it. Braking far too far away from traffic lights and intersections, "accelerating" by taking their foot off the brake and letting the engine idle them up to 15mph, and cornering so slowly that in some cases you would swear they'd actually parked mid-corner.
It comes down, once again, to driver education, or in this case a total lack of it. Americans, and Utahns in particular, are given such scant education when they learn to drive that it's laughable in comparison to other western countries. No night driving, no freeway driving, no explanation of how a car works - nothing. These are all things they're left to learn on their own, and for the most part you can tell. Everyday I follow people who are attempting to steer their car in a straight line, which of course means they're weaving all over the road. Just let go of the wheel if you have that much trouble. Short of a major mechanical issue, the car will steer itself in a straighter line than you're managing to. People driving along with their left foot resting on the brake, so that those of us behind have no idea when they're actually about to slow down because we're driving in a sea of permanently-illuminated brake lights. People coming to a gap big enough to get the Queen Mary through, but then parking their Corollas and Camrys because they think the gap is too small (because they have no idea of the extents of their car).
This stereotype was illustrated to me years ago when a colleague of mine invited me to drive his new car - a Mazda Speed 3. It was a fun little scoot - we took it up the nearest mountain road about 5 miles, turned around and came back down, and by the end of it he was white. I'd been driving like a European on a twisty mountain road. Like I do in my car. Or when I ride my motorbike. We'd been overtaking people on the broken yellow lines and hugging the corners because the Speed 3 was a very capable machine. Apparently though, in his 50-something years of living here, he'd never once driven these roads like that, and his parting comment was "don't ever drive my car again". I'm not sure his car ever went over 3000rpm after that.

The oddest car colour.

I know I talk about the monochrome nature of car-buyer's paint choices a lot, but I recently came across one particular manufacturer who had one paint colour that was more intriguing than the rest. Now I know a lot of the high end cars have multiple versions of black - Piano Black, Saloon Black, Midnight Starry Black, Swirling Vortex Of Evil Black, Blue So Dark It's Basically Black etc. So it was with a smile on my lips that I saw Luxury Brown listed as a paint colour. Let me say that again. Luxury. Brown. As in the colour of poo. Not only that, but you could get Metalflake Luxury Brown too, for it you want your poo-coloured car to sparkle in the sunlight. Honestly if that was the only "colour" option, I'm not surprised people end up with black, white, silver and grey.

Driverless cars will be an uphill battle in the UK

I love posting about drone cars - they're such delicious topics for debate. So this week I learned that the AA - the roadside assistance company in England - conducted a survey of 23,000 drivers in the wake of the government's announcement that they'd be starting drone car trials as early as 2015. It was a simple survey - do you want driverless cars or not? Contrary to similar surveys in the US where upwards of 80% of respondants have said they do, in the UK, the majority of drivers - 65% - don't want them. 43% of drivers don't even want road laws in place to allow them. There's going to need to be a big leap of faith to go from cars with intrusive "driver aids" to cars that are fully automated. (Many drivers, myself included, don't even like the "driver aids").

The difference - I think - is that European drivers are more well-educated on the topic of drone cars than US drivers. In America, from casual discussions I've had, most people don't understand that the only reason the Google driverless car trials (currently the most advanced) have been so successful is because they've been conducted in an area where the car has a centimetre-level GPS map of it's surroundings. You can't take any of the Google cars and put them in New York. Or London. Or anywhere outside the area where they've been, because Google doesn't have the fidelity of map needed for the car to work. It's not all sensors and realtime software functions - the cars are essentially following GPS-plotted routes and using the sensors to account for variances (traffic, pedestrians etc). We're still a very long way from fully driverless systems - and I for one am hoping it doesn't happen until long after I've left the planet.

Let me put it another way - to simplify it: you want to trust your life to an automated machine that will be built by car manufacturers that can't figure out a 37c ignition switch, airbag sensors or the position of the floor mats under the pedals? Good luck with that.

The escalating "arms war" in car "safety".

There's an interesting (and faulty) assumption that too many drivers make today : that you need a big car to be safe. In the US especially, super-sized SUVs are regarded as being super-safe because of their size. The problem is that when manufacturer A builds a slightly bigger one, then manufacturer B has to follow suit and then the car buyers see the bigger vehicle and assume that it must be safer. Never mind gas-mileage. Never mind practicality and usability, forward or rear visibility. Never mind that an increasing number of people are so dwarfed by their vehicles that they can't safely operate them. No - size is king, and when it comes to mothers with kids on the school run, absolute size rules at the expense of actual safety, common sense and logic.
This is going to come across as sexist, but it's a simple matter of geometry. Women, generally speaking, are smaller than men. When a decent-sized man can't get in or out of their SUV without adding steps and handles, and has to push the steering wheel down and the seat forwards just to be able to operate it, explain to me how a shorter woman who can barely see over the steering wheel is going to be able to safely operate the car. They can't. But they compensate by having the mental attitude that because it's bigger, it must be safer.
I have, sadly, two direct examples where the bigger vehicle lost out in a good sized smash. The first one was a Ford F-150 that hit my wife in her Toyota Yaris. Both vehicles were written off, so right there the 'bigger is better' mantra is undone because the damage to the F-150 turned out to be much more severe than the damage to the Yaris. Both drivers were injured. My wife only mildly - airbag and seatbelt burns. The F-150 driver was hospitalised for two days and had a broken leg. Again - bigger does not equal better.
The second example was when my own car - my Evoque - was pit-manuevered by a woman in an oversized SUV who didn't see me because she couldn't see around the blind spots and/or was more concerned with her children in the back than she was with the act of driving. The end of my spinout resulted in me hitting a parked Nissan Armada. Both the woman's SUV and the parked Nissan Armada were written off - they folded up like newspaper. It was shocking to see. My Evoque needed repairs, but was not written off because structurally it survived without any faults. The most surprising aspect was exactly how badly the Armada was damaged. The front of my car had a pushed-in bumper, a bent frame-end hangar (where the bumper is mounted) and then obviously radiator and headlight damage. The Armada exploded it's front wheel and tyre, bent the frame on both sides, folded the hood into the windshield, bent the passenger side door so badly it couldn't be opened, and utterly destroyed the roof. The headlight and radiator were done for, as was the a/c compressor, the water pump and most of the other ancilliary items on the front of the engine.
But yeah - bigger is better, right?

Rearview mirrors are not for putting on make-up.

I suppose we've all seen it - the person in front has their rearview mirror skewed so they can put on make-up, adjust their hair, shave, put their contact lenses in, or any number of other actions other than using it for it's designed purpose - to see what's behind you. Invariably, if this happens in stationary traffic, they won't adjust the mirror back again when the traffic starts moving, so they're essentially driving blind. I would say that they could use the outside mirrors, but then that assumes that they know what those are for. It seems more and more people are less and less concerned with the action of actually driving, being safe on the road, and being responsible. I suppose that explains why so many people want self-driving drone cars - people are so bored with the act of driving that they'll find any excuse to not do it. Which is a real shame, not to mention a danger to everyone else on the road. Imagine if airline pilots got to 1500ft from landing and said "screw it - I'm bored with this" and started texting.
I love driving and it drives me crazy (pun intended) to see so much abhorrent behaviour on the roads now. Really, if you're that bored, and think you're so important that the safety of everyone around you is a secondary concern, you ought to be in a bus. Or a taxi. Or a train. In fact you ought to be anywhere other than driving a 2-ton weapon badly.
The lack of training, lack of enthusiasm, lack of skill, lack of ability and lack of understanding is just epidemic now. People who pull out from side roads in front of you, instead of behind you where the traffic is clear. People who don't use their indicators, who stop in the middle of the road for no reason, and yes, people who do use their mirrors but for entirely the wrong purpose. What the hell happened? When did driving become the secondary function of being in a car?