Driving in Some Cities is a Blood Sport. Can Autonomous Cars Compete?

If Silicon Valley’s prophecies come true, driverless cars will soon radically transform millions of lives.

Google, Tesla and others promise to unleash some of the most revolutionary technology of the early 21st century: vehicles careening autonomously down highways, their digital scanners deftly identifying potential danger.

Pretty neat — if you live in California. But most people don’t. The typical driver on planet Earth must contend with hazards, human and animal, that simply do not exist on most American roads.

Like sprightly goats. Or 12-year-olds pushing vegetable carts down the center of your lane. Or a never-ending cavalcade of motorbikes veering so close to your car that the windows rattle.

Or on a bad day, all of the above.

In America and other wealthy nations, great hype surrounds the coming driverless car revolution — and much of it is warranted. But there has been little analysis of autonomous vehicles’ future (if any) in places such as India, Vietnam, Brazil or other major non-Western nations.

All evidence suggests that it could be difficult to transplant driverless car technology designed for the West to many places around the globe. Driving in America just isn’t comparable to the blood-sport traffic in certain tropical megacities.

Holidaymakers cruise the Pacific Coast Highway for pleasure. Traffic in Jakarta? That’s a gauntlet of pain.

We asked two experts — one specializing in tech, the other in policy — to speculate on autonomous cars’ future in the developing world.

Jit Ray Chowdhury is the chief technology officer at Auro. It’s a California-based startup creating fully autonomous shuttles for campuses and corporate parks. He’s originally from Kolkata, India.

James M. Anderson is an analyst with the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank. He has extensively studied the policy implications of driverless cars.

Here are a few of their observations:

1. At present, driverless cars would fail miserably in chaotic Indian traffic

“In a city like Kolkata, nobody follows [traffic] rules,” Chowdhury says. “They don’t obey lane markers. They’re constantly switching lanes … often driving within inches of the next car.”

This actually describes big-city traffic in much of the developing world. Even the most sophisticated autonomous cars currently being road-tested would fail in these environments, according to Chowdhury.

The car probably wouldn’t end up in a flaming accident. “It just wouldn’t move at all. It would be too timid,” he says. “You’d be stuck in traffic forever.”

Driverless cars are rigged up with an array of sensors that scan the road with radar, ultrasonic and laser waves. If there’s an object in close proximity to the car, it usually won’t move — and there are often humans or rival vehicles crowding around your car in cities such as Kolkata.

At this point in time, autonomous vehicles are programmed with algorithms that drive quite conservatively. “That wouldn’t work,” Chowdhury says. “The artificial intelligence would have to be more aggressive and take risks.”

Read more of the original article at PRI.

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