In 2020, Nissan Will Drive You—But Will Anyone Let It?

With the nonchalant candor usually reserved for vehicle-pricing announcements, Nissan execs announced yesterday that the company would be selling autonomous vehicles to the general public by 2020. And, by the way, the technology would spread throughout the lineup over the subsequent two product generations. This news is utterly, whatsnextingly boring. It's also thoroughly shocking. To begin, the credibility of Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn is always debatable. He far overshot estimates of electric-vehicle sales, and oversold hopes for Renault's recovery in Europe. In May, he said Nissan would double sales in the U.S. by 2017; that'd put it on par with Ford. Whether because of whimsical illustrations on the covers of pulp science magazines in the 1950s, utopian predictions brought on by the dystopia of the 1970s fuel crises, or the semiconductor revolution of the 1990s, autonomous cars have at least been in the public consciousness for eons. If not around the corner, they were around the corner of the horizon. But even with Google's visible autonomous car trials in California, or DARPA's Urban Challenge contest, most people probably would not say they expect to see a fully autonomous car the next time they enter a dealership. Nissan's timeline has it happening at about the same time the next BMW 3-series hits the market. Automaker and tech-industry prototypes demonstrate that the technology is already reasonably close to viability. Here are, in our view, the primary obstacles to Nissan's plans for 2020: The remaining fine-tuning of development. Designing a car that can detect most obstacles, make most judgment calls, interact with other vehicles in most situations, and read most road signs is within today's technological portfolio. It's the remainder of situations that test even human judgment and reflexes—spray-painted construction signs, the erratic driver in the rearview mirror, the cloud of soot from a semi—that will be the hardest to deal with. Humans prefer human error to computer error. Nissan joins other automakers and researchers in highlighting the likelihood that autonomous vehicles will reduce collisions. But we higher primates are pretty bad at reconciling our instincts with statistical probability. Even if owning an autonomous car halves the odds of being in a crash, most of us aren't in collisions often enough to appreciate that. Some autonomous cars will still be involved in collisions just by virtue of there being 250 million cars on the road in the U.S. today and roughly 5.5 million collisions per year. Go ask the hypothetical occupants of the one million, or 500,000, or even 100,000 crashed autonomous vehicles whether they'd trust their fate to a car's computer judgment again. Legal challenges. An endless number of news articles and TV pundits mention the probability that autonomous cars are not legal. New regulations in California and Nevada have been described as "legalizing" autonomous cars, implying that such vehicles were prohibited before. Is any of this true? Probably not. Experts like Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford Law School, believe that current laws don't disallow autonomous vehicles in the U.S. But there are tremendous questions about how we address other laws once autonomous vehicles are on the road. Who is liable in a crash between an autonomous vehicle and a conventional one? What about two autonomous vehicles? Would the operator of an autonomous vehicle be responsible for a collision if, in a split-second decision, they decided not to use override controls? Feature: The Autonomous Automobile—Can Robot Cars Evolve to Make Complex, Human-Like Decisions Behind the Wheel? Feature: The Car and Driver Tech 50 Feature: Driving In a Fake Swedish Town Surely someone within Nissan has read books or short stories by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Written in the genre of "magic realism," his works position the absurd as banal, and the normal as extraordinary. Just as residents of an isolated tropical town are awestruck by a block of ice, we're not surprised by Nissan's promise at all—and all the same, incredulous that it could actually happen. from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

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