Yahoo Autos Is That Autonomous Car Going To Spill Your Drink?
There are many versions of the story, but the bones of it are this: Sixty years ago, UAW president Walther Reuther was touring a Ford plant in the company of a few Ford executives. One of them pointed to a new bit of factory automation and asked, presumably with a knowing smile: "Mr. Reuther, how are you going to get that machine to pay union dues?" Reuther responded: "How are you going to get that machine to buy a Ford?"
We are reliably told by the media, the automakers, and the self-appointed know-nothing pundits out there that there are millions of autonomous cars headed our way in the next five years or so. Right now, the questions about those cars outnumber the answers by a comfortable margin. How will they deal with rain? Snow? If you're being driven home from a bar by your autonomous vehicle, is that a DUI charge? If a "thinking" car is heading towards a green-lit intersection at high speed only to see ten children step off the curb in one direction while Stephen Hawking's wheelchair enters the crosswalk from the other, should it make the decision to kill the kids or murder the physicist?
Yet there is only one question about self-driving automobiles that occupies my mind at the present, and it came to me while I was sitting in traffic a few days ago: What are the chances that the damned things will bother to accelerate at a reasonable rate? If they do, then as far as I'm concerned, we can use any available source of public funding, up to and including my son's college fund, to get as many of them on the road as possible, as quickly as possible.
I'll explain why I'm so agitated. When I got my driver's license way back in 1988, the best-selling car in America was the Ford Escort. The sporting variant of this, the Escort GT, did the quarter-mile in about eighteen seconds, but the standard car was hard-pressed to do it in under twenty, particularly if you had an automatic transmission. This kind of performance was pretty much par for the family-car course back then. Everything was slow off the line by today's standards, even Ferraris and the like.
As a consequence, if you were sitting a few cars back at a stoplight pretty much anywhere in this country with the exception of the major urban centers, you could reliably expect that three or four seconds would pass before the first car to see green would make it across the intersection. The next car behind it would start to accelerate when its driver was satisfied with the first car's speed.
I had a five-speed Datsun 200SX, which was a little bit quicker than the run-of-the mill sedan, so I found this lackadaisical behavior infuriating. Whenever I was at the front of a line, I dropped the clutch and hustled as hard as I could. Often, the car behind me would be the size of my fingernail in the rearview before it started moving.
That same 200SX, were it to appear as a new car today, would probably be the slowest car money could buy. Any Prius or Spark could whip it prettily handily. Today's best-selling cars are vastly, amazingly quicker than the best affordable iron that 1988 had to offer. I'm not talking about my Accord V6 here; that's a fairly rare car by mass-market standards. I'm talking about the Honda CR-V and the Toyota Corolla.
As a consequence of that and of a changed legislative climate, freeway speeds are up. Way up. Even twenty years ago, 85mph was considered to be quite sporting on the Interstate, enough that Brock Yates wrote with some amazement about how he could just rip down the road in a new LS400 at that speed in perfect comfort. Today, 85mph is the default freeway speed for SUVs, economy cars, and dual-rear-wheel pickups. In some places, like central Florida, doing 85mph in the left lane will get you a mirror full of Silverado grille in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
Yet the average driver still accelerates from a stoplight at a pace that I would charitably call "accumulative." Every day on my trip to and from work I will see people in 350-horsepower crossovers who seem to be literally unable to put more than six ounces' worth of pressure on the right-side pedal. A few years ago, I bought myself a 1982 VW Quantum coupe, very possibly the slowest car with valid plates in my entire county, and I was still getting held up leaving stoplights.
I've come to believe that the outrageous power available in everything from a Camry to a Cummins diesel nowadays might actually contribute to the problem. Drivers are afraid of being jerked around by the massive thrust offered by their Highlanders and whatnot at full throttle, so they operate the accelerator carefully. I remember doing the same thing the first time I ever rode a Kawasaki ZX-7RR at the age of nineteen or so. Just kidding. I actually twisted the grip to the stop and was almost thrown off the back of the bike as I careened wildly towards an intersection full of tractor-trailers. But a more sensible person would have been very careful with that motorcycle, and I think the average driver is almost as scared of his Nissan Altima as I should have been of that two-headlight terror back then.
Which leads us to wonder what, precisely, the owners of autonomous vehicles will expect when the light turns green. Surely these cars will be electric, which means they'll have maximum torque available at zero revs and the ability to launch hard when the green appears. Even a Nissan Leaf can surprise you from a dig, you know. But accelerating through an intersection at a Nissan Leaf's potential pace is gonna be absolutely unacceptable to the average citizen out there. These are the same adults who get nervous ridding kiddie coasters and who wear helmets riding mixte-frame bicycles around gated communities.
I have a feeling that the maximum permitted acceleration in the car of the future will be determined by a very simple metric: will it spill an open coffee cup? In other words, your autonomous journey will have to meet the standards of a post-takeoff commercial flight. This applies to cornering and braking as well. Anything more is going to scare the customers and send them scurrying back to the safety of their 621-horsepower AMG sport-utility-vehicles that they can toe-touch away from the green light at 0.05g.
Needless to say, this is bad news for those of us who want to drive ourselves. We are going be hemmed in by vehicles that won't exceed the dynamic envelope of a lawn tractor on wet grass. The only positive way to see it is that the future will be a sort of rolling freeway autocross where the cars are cones. You can train for this now by entering a new Viper ACR in a NASA HPDE 1 session, if you like.
So I find myself more or less in the position of a modern-day Walther Reuther. When the automakers ask me, "How can we get you into an autonomous car?" my response will be simple: "The hell with that. How can you get those autonomous cars out of my way?"
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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