Imagine getting into your car and telling the driver to take you to the office, the airport, or the mall. You relax while you’re ferried to your destination and dropped at the door. Your car then waits discreetly for your return trip. Not too unusual if you employ a driver or use a limo service. However, that’s a little pricey for the mass market. But, imagine that your driver is not a human being but rather an affordable, computerized feature on your vehicle.
After percolating in the labs for decades, such technology is finally almost ready for deployment. And, it promises to revolutionize the way we drive, for better or worse.
As Bob Lutz, probably today’s most respected automotive visionary, explained in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, “We are without a doubt near the day when you can climb into a car on Long Island, program it to take you to your niece’s house in Chicago, hit enter and execute, and after the first 100 yards, once you hit a thoroughfare, the car takes over automatically and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
According to Lutz, who has held top jobs at Ford and Chrysler and is currently vice chairman of General Motors, “Sooner rather than later, we’ll be able to take the driver right out of the driving equation.”
Sooner would be better than later, because the need for such a system exists right now. The U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration measures the effects of congestion in terms of human time and individual wage loss. Its studies reveal that congestion results in at least 5.7 billion person-hours of delay each year in the United States. Broken down by driver, the cost of congestion surpassed $900 in 1997. When the costs of lost wages and wasted fuel are added up for the entire U.S. population, the total cost of congestion is $72 billion a year.
Clearly, there is enormous demand for a better system. The progress in developing the new technology is being driven by the exponential growth of computing power and the dramatic decline in the cost of data storage. Those factors are critical because cost is a critical issue for vehicles. Automakers have to be able to develop systems that are “fail-safe” at an affordable price.
As Lutz explains, the technology already exists. “We have radar technology that...
