The Consumer Electronics Association, (CEA) the annual host for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January, recently published a paper entitled, 5 Technology Trends to Watch 2014.  One of these technologies is Driverless Cars.

One of the first sections of this paper is a series of survey results done by the CEA.  These results seem totally meaningless.  For example, they asked people about their “willingness to ride in driverless vehicles” and only 49% of the people said they would be willing to ride in a driverless vehicle at less than 35 miles per hour.  However, we’ve travelled through numerous airports with modern autonomous train systems that go between terminals and have never seen a case where more than half the people walked instead.  Asking the general public detailed questions about technologies they may know little or nothing about seems like a complete waste of time.

The article later breaks down a series of additional questions by race.  Why would this be in any way relevant?

The paper then goes through a reasonable discussion of some of the telecommunications and software challenges for connected vehicles but of course in the limited space it only really scratches the surface.

The best part of the paper is the discussion on the challenges for drivers to take over control of the car from the computer if required.  This issue basically stems from the computer or the human being detecting that the human being needs to take over driving and the time that it takes to make this transition especially if the human being is not paying close attention.  (People don’t do that today when they should be driving so it seems really unlikely that they will when they are just sitting there).  The transition from auto-pilot to manual control in airplanes is one of the safety issues that aerospace safety experts still worry about.  We too see this as a potentially large problem as early limited driverless vehicles are rolled out.  This is well summed up in their quote from David Jenkins a retired pilot:

Computers make great monitors for people, but people make poor monitors for computers.

So, this wouldn’t be the first paper that we’d recommend to review but it does bring up some interesting points (once you get past the surveys).