Detroit Free Press: Peters cheers self-driving vehicles but warns of policy lags

MACKINAC ISLAND — Trying to sort through the hype about self-driving cars? You could do worse than to listen to U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., one of the more thoughtful civic leaders on future mobility issues.

Speaking here at the annual Mackinac Policy Conference, Peters sounds an initial note of optimism about the technological progress we’re seeing toward autonomous vehicles.

 “It’s going to happen a lot sooner than people will realize,” Peters told me here at the Grand Hotel. “The technology is moving very, very rapidly. Ford Motor Co. has announced they’ll have a self-driving vehicle in 2021. That’s just right around the corner.

“I know that’s an ambitious goal. We’ll see if they’ll be able to achieve it. But the fact that they put a marker in the sand, saying they think we can have a production car by this time. That lets the world know these auto companies are moving full-steam ahead.”

But Peters cautions that the transition to self-driving cars and trucks won’t follow a smooth road.

“This is the most disruptive technology since Henry Ford had the assembly line,” he said. “There’s no question it’s all those policy issues, the moral-ethical issues, all sort of issues that are now trailing technology generally, not just autos.

"We’re on an exponential curve in terms of technological advancement with self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, synthetic biology, the list goes on of what we’re seeing happen at an accelerating rate.

“And yet when you talk about public policy, it moves at a constant rate, which I call the 'snail pace.' It’s very slow. So that means if you’re not trying to think ahead, you’re going to be quickly overrun by technology.”

Serving on the Senate Commerce Committee, Peters is working with the majority Republicans to craft legislation that addresses a range of issues related to future mobility. Some of the issues relate to auto insurance. If everyone has a self-driving car and those vehicles prove as safe as their proponents predict, will we need auto insurance at all? And in case of an accident, who’s liable if no one is at the controls?

Peters suggests the rollout of autonomous vehicles will take place soon but in controlled environments.

“You’ll see the (ride-sharing services) Lyfts and Ubers of the world using self-driving vehicles in a corralled area in an urban core,” he said. “You may see some in long-distance driving on highways. I think you’ll also see more on the commercial side when it comes to trucks.”

And one of the more interesting deployments of autonomous vehicles could be in war zones. “The Department of Defense has actually done a lot of research on autonomous vehicles,” he said. “In some ways, they really started this whole movement to reduce war fighters’ deaths in logistics operations.

“More soldiers and Marines died in Iraq driving logistics vehicles like fuel vehicles than died in combat. It’s very dangerous to drive a fuel truck to the front. And if you can take the driver out and have it automated to get it to the front and give it to the war fighters, you’re going to save lives.”

This transitional space between today’s often-chaotic roads with nearly 40,000 deaths a year because of accidents and tomorrow’s smoothly running world of digitally controlled vehicles represents the most challenging aspect of the mobility debate.

Elsewhere at the policy conference, John Kwant, Ford’s vice president of City Solutions for Ford Smart Mobility, cautioned at a panel discussion on the future of cities that “all of these things become exponential. ... You need a critical amount of connectiveness. ... You’ve not going to be able to have autonomous vehicles without that coordination going on.”

Or as Peters put it: “A big part of self-driving vehicles is vehicle-to-vehicle communications. So that means a Toyota has to talk to a Ford, and a Ford has to talk to a GM and (a) Nissan, and they have to be all linked in a way that we’re not used to now.”

Clearly, nobody has all the answers yet to the myriad questions arising from future mobility needs and technology. But at least people like Peters are asking a lot of the right questions.