Automated driving technology brings advantages and questions

CORALVILLE — The great American pastime is on notice. No, not baseball. Driving.

Vehicles can steer themselves, stay between the stripes and adjust to the pace of traffic and speed limit changes. Young drivers may never need to know the art of parallel parking because cars can do that now, too. Even red lights may be a little too dull to warrant the reflexes of motorists.

'The technology is here,' Daniel McGehee, director of the Transportation and Vehicle Safety Research Division at the UI Public Policy Center, said while operating a Volvo XC90 research vehicle on Interstate 80.

Its vanity plates read AU2M8.

Totally driverless vehicles are still years away, but a spectrum of semiautonomous features already are on the roadway, with more to come. McGehee and others are careful to point out the technology is a safety feature intended to assist, not replace the driver, who remains in control.

While the Volvo research vehicle includes a suite of features, today's new vehicles typically include one or two but not all options.

That is changing. The technology is getting better, cheaper and trickling down from high-end to lower-end price points of new vehicles. Features, such as adaptive cruise control, automated emergency breaking and assisted-parking, eventually will be as common as air bags.

'It's going to happen quickly,' McGehee said. 'Market penetration is going to skyrocket overnight, partly because it is getting so cheap.'

Bruce Anderson, president of the Iowa Automobile Dealers Association, said the technology will filter in for two reasons. First, the average age of the U.S. fleet is 11 years old, meaning new automated features are being integrated each year.

Second, consumers demand it.

New features 'eventually become the norm, and customers want and demand them in all classes of vehicles,' Anderson said. 'I think it's likely that will be the case again with things like lane-change assist, automatic emergency braking and the other kinds of automated features that are appearing today.'

The price tag on the 2016 Volvo XC90 is about $68,000, but new cars in the $20,000 to $30,000 range also have automated features, such as the Subaru Impreza, Honda CRVs and Toyota Prius, McGehee said.

McGehee has been studying automated features for more than two decades, trying to understand what motorists will respond to and trust. It is exciting to him to see the proliferation begin.

The evolution of automation is being helped, in part, because of the backing of key organizations, and Iowa is in the middle of it.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Safety Council and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration see tremendous potential for reducing deaths and serious injuries from driver error.

'Our cars don't fly yet, but I think we are getting closer to the world that we saw in the Jetsons,' said Deborah Hersman, president and chief executive of National Safety Council. 'Innovation continues to march forward and these safety technologies are the stair steps to get us to autonomous vehicles.'

McGehee joined Hersman, U.S. DOT secretary Anthony Foxx, and others in Washington, D.C., this month to launch the MyCarDoesWhat campaign, focused on educating the public on new features cars today have but remain a mystery to many people.

The campaign is being funded by a $17.2 million grant the UI Public Policy Center received in 2014 following a Toyota Economic Loss class action settlement in California.

Moment of truth

McGehee took The Gazette for a spin around Johnson County on local roads and the interstate showcasing how the vehicle operates.

The moment of truth came as McGehee took his hands off the steering wheel and feet off the pedals with the Volvo cruising at 65 mph. The SUV started to drift to the left stripe, but then corrected toward the right.

As the speed limit increases from 65 to 70 mph leaving Coralville for Tiffin, the Volvo zoomed up to speed, and later slowed to offset a semi traveling at 68.

With cameras positioned at the front, sides and back of the Volvo, the computer system 'reads' the landscape around by recognizing vehicles as boxes that shrink or expand, based on the proximity of the vehicles.

On Court Street in Iowa City, McGehee turned on the parking-assist feature, pulled past an open spot and waited for the vehicle to take over the parallel parking duties. McGehee still had to shift between reverse and drive, but the vehicle cut into the space and kept correcting until it was centered.

Still room for improvement, but it's not hard to see the potential as the technology develops.

'When you sit in a vehicle and someone takes their feet and hands off vehicle, it takes a while to get comfortable with that,' said Iowa DOT Director Paul Trombino.

Transportation officials, such as Trombino, who design, build and maintain the roadways, have to respond to the rapid deployment of automated technology in planning for not only how vehicles look and operate today, but also in 10, 25 and even 75 years from now.

'From our perspective, from a department side, my interest is what are the things we can do today to make the system viable for automated vehicles,' Trombino said. 'We are trying to make good decision about what is going to happen.'

Trombino said the move to automation is not on an evolutionary path but a disrupted accelerated path.

Trombino has been embracing automation, and as the newly elected president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials he has a national stage to make Iowa a leader in research of autonomous vehicles.

He works with McGehee, who calls Trombino visionary on this front.

The focus at the Iowa DOT is paint markings — ensuring fresh, clear, crisp paint stripes — and high-definition mapping of the road system to support the needs of automated vehicles. Automation today typically use cameras and sensors to read road features, such paint markings, speed signs and other cars.

The Iowa DOT spends approximately $5.7 million a year on painting the roads, including repainting centerlines and dashes annually, edge lines every other year, and curbs and miscellaneous markings less frequently.

The retro-reflective style paint includes glass spears, which reflect light at night making it more visible for drivers, and offers plenty of contrast during the day, said Bob Younie, Iowa DOT director of maintenance.

He said the paint applications are sufficient for the automation that exists today.

'There's a bit of a learning curve for autonomous vehicles,' Younie said. 'It could be, in the future, line-painting technology will get better, and will work in the snow and rain. Or maybe we won't need the paint at all' for automated vehicles.

Uncertainty lingers about how automation will work in the winter or during heavy rains when visibility is limited.

The solution could lie in high-def mapping and GPS, which would allow vehicles to rapidly consume data to operate on the road, such as knowing where the lane is or where to turn.

'Mapping has been done to the meter level,' Trombino said. 'Our goal is to build maps down to a centimeter level.'

Planners and policy makers also must be cognizant of other developments on the horizon, such as vehicle-to-vehicle communications, which would allow a vehicle to recognize an accident several vehicles ahead and begin breaking, and vehicle-to-traffic light communication.

Shippers could benefit from convoys in which a series of trucks could caravan as one unit, which would require examination of tailgating laws.

Self-driving vehicles programmed never to break the speed limit also could put a dent in city, county and state revenues for speeding violations.

Other questions also have arisen.

A University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute released a white paper this past week titled, 'Should We Require Licensing Tests and Graduated Licensing for Self-Driving Vehicles?' Authors Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle concluded, 'There are several arguments in support of the need for self-driving vehicles to pass a licensing test that would allow them to operate in all driving situations.'

While the automated technology generates science fiction-esque awe from some, others are leery.

Could automation be so successful motorist will lose the ability to own and drive a vehicle, either through mandate or because it become so cost prohibitive from insurance or other means?

John Bowman, vice president of the National Motorist Association, agrees there is an upside with automation, and calls the future 'intriguing.' For example, it could unlock new freedom for the elderly or disabled.

But his members and staff don't want to see the loss of driving rights, which he said is a concern.

'At a very basic level, people with in our association like to drive,' Bowman said. 'We like being able to get into our car and be able to control the vehicle ourselves. People who are enthusiasts for driving don't want to be have to go to a track some day to be able to drive a car.'