This is an exciting era we’re in. Autonomy will be the biggest shift in how we interact with our cars in decades, and it’s going to reshape how we transport ourselves more than any other advancement in recent memory. It’s going to end up far, far weirder than we think, I’m pretty sure, so we may as well get a head start and think some things through.
Don’t worry. It’ll be fun.
Chapter 1
We’ve Been Here Before
For all the excitement and hype surrounding autonomous vehicles, it’s worth remembering that, for most of the history of mankind, we’ve been using vehicles that were capable of full autonomy. We call these vehicles “horses” or sometimes “donkeys” or “camels” or any number of other large, muscular mammals that we’ve coerced into taking us from place to place. All of these are, of course, fully autonomous, and have been for thousands and thousands of years before any horse ever even saw a human.
Generally, horses and other animals squander their autonomy wandering around, eating lawns, having steamy horse sex and making new horses to start the whole thing over again. Once employed by humans for the purpose of transport, animals like horses became, effectively, semiautonomous vehicles.
There’s actually an accepted system in place for describing levels of autonomy for cars, known as the SAE (that’s Society of Automotive Engineers, like the Freemasons but much worse dressers) automation levels. They break down like this:
Level 0: No automation, the human driver does all the driving.
Level 1: Driver assistance, an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) on the vehicle can sometimes assist the human driver with either steering or braking/accelerating, but not both simultaneously.
Level 2: Partial automation, an ADAS on the vehicle can actually control both steering and braking/accelerating simultaneously under some circumstances. The human driver must continue to pay full attention (“monitor the driving environment”) at all times and perform the rest of the driving task.
Level 3: Conditional automation, an automated driving system (ADS) on the vehicle can perform all aspects of the driving task under some circumstances. In those circumstances, the human driver must be ready to take back control at any time when the ADS requests the human driver to do so. In all other circumstances, the human driver performs the driving task.
Level 4: High automation, an ADS on the vehicle can perform all driving tasks and monitor the driving environment—essentially, do all the driving—in certain circumstances. The human driver need not pay attention in those circumstances.
Level 5: Full automation, an automated driving system on the vehicle can do all the driving in all circumstances. The human occupants are just passengers and need never be involved in driving.
Based on our modern scales, I’d have to say a vehicle composed of a horse and cart is somewhere between Levels 3 and 4: the “vehicle” is in complete control, but some human intervention is required.
Of course, the manner in which a horse is autonomous is quite different from an electromechanical car. While the destination is pretty much a given for an autonomous car, thanks to GPS, the horse doesn’t necessarily know it. What a horse does know are the fundamental mechanics of driving. A horse inherently knows how to stay on a road, follow a path, avoid obstacles, stop if confronted with confusion or danger, make turns, look for potential hazards, and so on. What the horse relies on the human for are inputs regarding the desired speed of travel and guidance to maintain a proper path.
With a horse-car, you’re not “steering” the horse in the same way that you steer a car—the horse is handling those mechanics. You’re guiding the animal to your destination, and, in some cases, the horse may even know familiar routes and paths, so what the driver needs to do in a horse-car can be pretty minimal.
We forget just how much natural processing an equine brain is doing to drag a streetcar along a path—it’s essentially what we’re currently trying to make automated vehicles (AVs) do. It should remind us that getting a car safely to your desired destination requires a very specific set of skills, and there’s no reason to assume that, as humans, we’re somehow hardwired to know how to do it. In fact, the fates of the two earliest human-driven automobiles speak directly to how unprepared we were, and how difficult the basic task of piloting a moving machine really is.
An automobile is any self-propelled wheeled machine designed to transport passengers and/or cargo. What powers that car—as long as it’s mechanical in nature, somehow, doesn’t really matter. A steam car is as much an automobile as a gasoline, diesel, or electric car. I want to make that abundantly clear in case anyone reading over your shoulder decides to pedantically correct this book. If someone does, please tell them to get bent.
The first machine that we can really call an automobile—a self-propelled, mechanical, wheeled machine driven by a human—was Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s 1769 steam dray.
(I know Mercedes-Benz likes to talk about how they invented the car; they cite the 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen as the first example. Don’t be taken in by this self-serving bit of historical revisionism.)
Cugnot’s steam dray was designed to be an artillery-hauling truck, basically, and as such was designed in a way that made handling pretty terrible. Really, you probably couldn’t design a worse vehicle to drive than Cugnot did, but, in his defense, no one had any idea what the hell “handling” was or what “driving” would be like, or anything at all like that. These problems simply didn’t exist before Nick-Joe fired up the huge, teapot-like boiler on the steam dray.
This first car, being designed to haul heavy artillery, cannonballs, and other massive iron things, was designed with all the mechanical parts (and weight) well up front, with a large, flatbed-like area at the rear. The solitary and massive front wheel was driven by steam pistons, and in front of the wheel hung the massive, heavy boiler.
The driver of this thing was expected to steer with a set of handlebars that looked like a steampunk bull’s horns, and that driver would likely need the strength of a steampunk bull to be effective. The vehicle was designed to be balanced when piled high with cannonballs or towing cannon. Laden, the balance would likely have been better, but the whole thing would have been so heavy as to be deeply ungainly. Unladen, it would have been lighter, but with all the weight on the one front wheel, steering would have been a nightmare.
Cugnot not only invented the automobile, he invented lethal understeer.
Understeer, when a car turns less sharply than desired, is what happens with nose-heavy, front-wheel drive cars because they naturally want to go in straight lines. Cugnot’s steam dray was a ridiculous caricature of this design, and as a result, the first test ended up with Cugnot driving it into a wall, which he partially demolished. The second test didn’t fare much better; the truth is that I doubt the steam dray could have been driven effectively. The design was far too unforgiving and difficult and, what’s more, nobody had any idea how to drive.
The next attempt at an automobile was built by William Murdoch in 1784 and seemed to recognize the layout issues that Cugnot’s vehicle had, and pretty much corrected them. Too bad it only existed as a subscale working model. If it had been built to human scale, it’s likely it would have been far more drivable than the Cugnot car.
In 1801, the invent-cars project was renewed with the help of a Cornish man named Richard Trevithick who built a crude but full-scale test vehicle, the Puffing Devil. In 1803, he built a much more realized vehicle, arguably the very first passenger car designed to be a passenger automobile from the start, the London Steam Carriage.
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