Self-driving cars could have long road to acceptance

• GM says self-driving cars coming somewhere within 1 to 100 years
• Government has urged caution on testing self-driving cars
• But trade group head compares autonomous vehicles to a cure for cancer

DETROIT - When it comes to self-driving cars, public relations is a bigger hurdle than technology, many participants at an autonomous vehicle conference said here this week.

"The technology maturation is there, but the public acceptance is not there," says Michael Toscano, CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which sponsored the conference.

To understand the safety potential of autonomous vehicles, Toscano says more people need to have vehicles with limited autonomous features already available, such as systems that hit brakes when crashes are imminent and ones that keep cars in their lane. "You have to experience the technology to know what you'll accept" when it comes to malfunctions, says Toscano. He says that if it was known that cars would kill 40,000 people a year, "Henry Ford wouldn't have sold a single car."

No one would question a cure for cancer that could eliminate as many as 80% of the deaths, he says, and that's what he believes eliminating the driver could accomplish.

Other opinions varied widely here on how much consumer interest there is in self-driving cars and how fast industry and government should move towards them.

Former Volkswagen and Audi self-driving vehicle expert Annie Lien said response to the "Piloted Driving" self-parking car Audi showed at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was overwhelming and showed early adopters are ready. The system, which includes technology installed in the parking garage, lets the vehicle find a space and park itself.

Lien compares self-driving cars to electric vehicles, which have attracted only a sliver of the public but are popular in Silicon Valley where she lives. She says she sees two or three pricey electric Teslas every time she gets on the road.
"Like with every new technology, there has to be a group of early adopters," says Lien, now a consultant. When it comes to self driving cars, "they are ready and they are waiting."

But General Motors would only give a time frame of between one and 100 years for fully autonomous vehicles.And Volvo said it largely cancelled a program involving autonomous test vehicles that followed each other on a track.

While up to 97% of crashes are caused by driver error, the keynote speaker warned that the public is far less accepting of mechanical failure than human error. Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist Bryan Reimer, in his speech, said that an autonomous vehicle fatal crash could set back adoption of even the limited and very useful crash mitigation technologies spreading now to cars.

Semiconductor company Osram, for example, is doing plenty of business in lasers and sensors going into many new cars for safety systems that aid the driver and is in no hurry to see fully autonomous vehicles. But Amine Taleb, senior product marketing manager for infrared products says, "Autonomous is ultimately going to happen."

"Safety is critical, but the technology is already being proven," says Jay Napoli, a sales VP at supplier KVH Industries, whose company sells inertial measurement technology that supplements vehicle GPS systems. "It's not technology that is the obstacle."

He cites the 500,000 miles of autonomous miles in the Google Car. The only crash was when a driver was behind the wheel and the Google car was hit by someone else.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety research chief Nat Beuse disagrees with the assessment by many that its recently announced autonomous vehicle policy pushed a "go slow" approach.

The agency is moving aggressively on the simpler and already available "autonomous technologies, such as automatic braking, to determine if they have safety benefits and their limitations," says Beuse. "They are the building blocks to fully realize autonomous vehicles."