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The future of driving, Part III: hack my ride

In the final installment of our "future of driving" series, we look at the …

A bumpy ride

In the first two parts of our "Future of Driving" series, we examined the technology that exists today and explored how the world could change when self-driving technologies become widely available. The previous installment focused on the potential benefits of self-driving technologies, and so it offered an optimistic vision of where self-driving could take us. This, our final installment, brings things back down to earth by looking at the politics of self-driving cars and considering some of the many ways things could go awry. Excessive tort liability and government regulation could keep viable self-driving technologies off the road. Customers could lose control over their own vehicles to automakers seeking DMCA-like anti-circumvention laws. Most ominously, the government is likely to seek a "back door" that gives them the power to seize control of self-driving vehicles.

Self-driving cars will be at the center of a lot of political controversies during the 21st century. Read on for a sneak preview.

A self-driving Apollo Project?

The first question that will confront policymakers is what, if anything, governments can or should do to hasten the introduction of self-driving technologies. One advocate for a greater government role is Brad Templeton, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has recently become an evangelist for self-driving technologies. Templeton draws a parallel to John F. Kennedy's famous speech where he announced the Apollo project to send a man to the moon. Templeton believes that the necessary computing power and sensing hardware will be ready by the end of the next decade, and he tells Ars that government support could accelerate the necessary software breakthroughs and allow the introduction of viable self-driving products by 2020. He suggests that the next president could make the acceleration of self-driving technologies a focus of a state of the union address early in his term.

Templeton is quick to stress that the Apollo analogy shouldn't be taken too literally. "Apollo was a mission to send two men to walk on the moon," Templeton tells Ars. That's a very different problem than designing a technology that will be usable by and affordable to tens of millions of ordinary customers. Rather than proposing a single, monolithic government research project akin to the Apollo and Manhattan projects, Templeton envisions the next president publicizing the technology, supporting subsidies for self-driving research, and clearing away red tape to ensure that vehicles can be introduced promptly once they're ready. He argues that DARPA offers a promising model: fund multiple small, independent teams that are working on hard technical problems, and see what they come up with.

Other scholars are more skeptical of an active government role in promoting self-driving technologies. Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who studies energy issues, notes that American presidents have a long history of touting next-generation automotive technologies, and most of them haven't panned out. Jimmy Carter, for example, was convinced that conventional cars powered by synthetic oil was the future of automation. The early 1990s saw a hot debate in Congress among advocates of ethanol, methanol, and other oil substitutes. Also in the 1990s, California required the increased sale of zero-emission vehicles such as electric or hydrogen-fueled cars within ten years, a goal that was never achieved. Most recently, the Bush administration has pushed a number of alternative automotive technologies, including hydrogen-powered vehicles, cars powered by switchgrass, and plug-in hybrids. Meanwhile, a billionaire named T. Boone Pickens is pushing a plan for cars powered by natural gas.

In short, Taylor argues, it's hard to predict which automotive technologies will be most successful. If self-driving technologies are commercially viable, companies have ample incentive to invest in them. If they're not, government subsidies are unlikely to make up the difference. Taylor argues that rather than trying to anticipate the specific technologies that will prove most successful, the government should create a hospitable environment for research and development spending in general and let private investors decide which technologies to invest in.

Litigation nation

Of course, one reason that private investors might not want to invest in automotive technologies is the risk of excessive liability in the case of crashes. The tort system serves a valuable function by giving manufacturers a strong incentive to make safe, reliable products. But too much tort liability can have the perverse consequence of discouraging the introduction of even relatively safe products into the marketplace. Templeton tells Ars that the aviation industry once faced that problem. At one point, "all of the general aviation manufacturers stopped making planes because they couldn't handle the liability. They were being found slightly liable in every plane crash, and it started to cost them more than the cost of manufacturing the plane." Airplane manufacturers eventually convinced Congress to place limits on their liability.

At the moment, crashes tend to lead to lawsuits against human drivers, who rarely have deep pockets. Unless there is evidence that a mechanical defect caused the crash, car manufacturers tend not to be the target of most accident-related lawsuits. That would change if cars were driven by software. And because car manufacturers have much deeper pockets than individual drivers do, plaintiffs are likely to seek much larger damages than they would against human drivers. That could lead to the perverse result that even safer self-driving cars would be more expensive to insure than human drivers.

Since car manufacturers, rather than drivers, would be the first ones sued in the event of an accident, car companies are likely to protect themselves by buying their own insurance. And if insurance premiums get too high, they may take the route the aviation industry did and seek limits on liability. An added benefit for consumers is that most would never have to worry about auto insurance. Cars would come preinsured for the life of the vehicle (or at least the life of the warranty).

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits