Autonomous driving to kill driving pleasure?

Siddharth becomes one of the few people to experience an autonomous car – and, yes, he’s as enamoured as the next guy but not entirely happy at the same time.

Most automobile journalists embrace new technologies that are rapidly making their way into our vehicles. And I’m happy to say that I find myself on this side of the fence on most occasions too. Technology helps make our cars safer, more reliable, increasingly efficient, and, of course, more convenient.

But when it comes to autonomy, I’ve been sceptical. I’m all for driver aids – adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, blind spot warning, emergency braking, collision aversion, and, yes, even the wonderful little self-parking function. Cars let themselves out of the garage and keep the air-conditioning on too these days – to make it easier for you to jump in and pull away quickly. But when it comes to self-driving, I’m not sure that I’m quite as happy. So, it was with some mixed feelings that I got into the Fusion hybrid autonomous car in Dearborn at Ford’s Product Development Centre. It was great to be one of the few to try out an autonomous car.

Ford has already said that it’s working on a fully autonomous, mass-market model primarily for ride sharing services. Ford’s autonomous car will be ready by 2021 – just 5 years from now. It’s already begun testing some of the technology it already has at hand – while continuously developing and enhancing it as it gets to the final product. And that was the car I was driving… um… riding in.

The retrofitted Fusion hybrid had Lidar, radar, and multiple cameras on board. The car works just fine and did three things that I expected it would – it obeyed all traffic rules like signs and speed limits, it detected pedestrians, slowed and stopped when needed to give them the right of way and it also erred on the side of caution when it came to other vehicles that were in traffic on the prescribed route – driven by humans of course!

In the United States, 30 new vehicles are sold every minute. In that same minute, though, there are 7 million miles driven by over 125,000 taxis and Ubers that on the road, along with 60,000 shared rides. In addition, statistics from Ford indicate that 450,000 bytes of data from connected vehicles and 350,000 apps are also being downloaded – all in that minute. So, many automakers now believe that the world is transitioning from owning vehicles to sharing them. Given that it’s indeed a changing world, why am I then lamenting the arrival of the self-driving car? No, it is not for the fear that these cars may be hacked into, or that the software running them may crash – or indeed that cars may not ‘talk’ to each other or the controlling network effectively enough. I believe that there’ll be enough advancement in technology and regulation, as well as a failsafe to ensure that these problems are not much more than teething troubles at best. No, the part that upsets me is the death of driving for pleasure. Well, maybe not a complete end to it, but what’s the point if driving yourself is restricted to parks, tracks or other controlled environments alone?

The thrill of the open road, the wind rushing at you, the magic of discovery, the rush of adrenaline – how can a machine or a programme replace that? So call me old school, but I do hope that it takes decades for all of this to really take over – so that I’m well and truly done with all my driving by then! As for the technology – having seen it up close and personal, I hail Ford and the others for their efforts. And I continue to marvel at just what the human brain can achieve when it sets out to do so.