Autonomous vehicle explosion brings challenges

Conundrum is defined by Webster's New World College Dictionary as a puzzling question or problem.

The exploding autonomous vehicle phenomenon is presenting the automobile industry with a thicket of conundrums. These challenges will keep an army of engineers, lawyers, politicians, venture capitalists, academics, cybersecurity professionals, ethicists and even philosophers busy for years, and even decades, to come.

If the standing-room-only crowd at the 2015 Automated Vehicles Symposium in Ypsilanti, Mich., last week is any indication, there's no hotter topic in the auto industry right now.

Cem Saraydar, director of electrical controls and systems for General Motors, likened the shift to driverless vehicles to the transformation that took place when the horseless carriage replaced the horse more than a century ago.

How does the car industry come to grips with new technologies some analysts believe might actually lead to the sale of fewer cars?

Glenn Mercer, a freelance auto industry investment adviser and panelist at the conference said: "Think of the conundrum facing BMW. When you're the 'ultimate driving machine,' how do you market technologies that don't have you drive?"

Another conundrum: Ethics. Chris Gerdes, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, addressed the industry challenge presented by the kinds of choices, both large and small, that humans make every day behind the wheel. How do automated cars make ethical decisions in traffic? Gerdes showed a picture of an illegally parked minivan on a narrow road in California. The van was parked in such a way that no vehicle could pass without crossing the double yellow line, an illegal move in California.

"Does the automated vehicle break the law or wait all day? We are forcing the vehicle to make ethical considerations," Gerdes said. 

Vehicles are becoming ever more connected to one another and to the infrastructure around them. Sensors are becoming incredibly sophisticated, but there are limits. 

Said Kay Stepper, vice president of regional business driver assistance and automated driving for Robert Bosch: "Motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians -- they're certainly not running around with radar around their necks or lidar on their heads. We need to address this very vulnerable population."

Who's at fault when a driverless car collides with a vehicle that's driven by a human? Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car program, said here that recent accidents involving Google's self-driving cars were the fault of other drivers, not Google's technology. But how will police and insurance companies be so sure in future cases?

One panel discussed the maze that investors face as they handicap which automated vehicle companies to sink money into. Should they put their money in so-called mobility companies such as Uber, traffic intelligence firms such as Inrix, or in automation technology specialists such as the Israeli camera-sensor specialist Mobileye, currently a hot stock? 

"I think there will be dozens of billion-dollar companies built as a result" of the convergence of transportation and autonomy, said Zach Barasz with the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. 

Betting on certain obvious megatrends might be one guidepost. 

Said Mercer: "The one thing we can predict in the United States is that our population will age and the number of people who are elderly or disabled is going up. A 25-mph, urban-runabout autonomous vehicle is a no-brainer for restoring mobility. There's a real upside for the car company that can figure out how to crack it." 

But industry's biggest news story last week served as a stark reminder there are more pressing issues the industry has to face as it hurtles pell-mell into the age of connected and autonomous cars. Two professional hackers demonstrated they could remotely take control of a Jeep Cherokee, shutting off the engine and sending a Wired magazine journalist into a ditch. In other words, a car piloted by a driver had suddenly, dangerously become driverless. 

That's one conundrum the industry will have to come to grips with very quickly indeed.