Riding in a self-driving vehicle requires you to
suspend your belief that man is better than machine. You have to trust that the steering wheel moving below your
hovering hands is turning in the right direction and the right
amount.
You have to hope that the acceleration you feel will stop
when you reach the right speed and not careen out of control. You have to believe that this truck, a mashup of metal
and gears and circuit boards, is a better driver than you,
for you have given control of your life to a machine and are
blindly trusting that it actually sees the road better than
you.
It’s a leap of faith, and one that I only realized how miraculous
it was after I saw how the self-driving truck I was riding in
knew the difference between an open lane and the open sky.
Flipping the switch I’d never been in a self-driving vehicle until I rode in the back
of an Otto truck on Friday.
Uber had
just revealed that it bought the company for
an estimated $680 million for its technology that takes
existing, newer trucks and retrofits them with a combination of
sensors and radar.
Otto’s goal is to make a truck drive itself in a way that’s so
safe and reliable that a long-haul trucker could take a nap in
the back. Its promo videos show a truck with an empty seat in the
front, the steering wheel eerily turning by itself.
Otto’s product lead Eric Berdinis says the goal is for a trucker
to be able to go to sleep in El Paso and be able to wake up in
Dallas — about nine hours later.
But it’s still the early days for self-driving
technology. An
ardent Tesla fan died after a truck turned in front of
his car, and neither he nor the Tesla saw it. So Otto,
which hasn’t had any accidents, knows something will go wrong
at some point.
Darren Weaver/Tech Insider
So far, Otto’s testing still requires that a trained and licensed
manager, like Senior Program Manager Matt Grigsby, to sit behind
the wheel, hands hovering just in case something happens. Systems
Testing Engineer Brian Gagliardi sat next to him as a
copilot, reading the screen on a laptop to make sure the truck
sees what he sees and doesn’t make a mistake.
The dream as Berdinis describes it is that one day the
dual-trucker system most companies use is replaced by one trucker
and a computer. Instead of splitting shifts for sleep, the
partner would be the computer and the trucker would handle things
like exits and driving in cities.
Leaving Otto’s headquarters in the SOMA neighborhood of San
Francisco, Grigsby, the human driver, took the wheel
until we got on to Interstate 280. Then he pushed the “engage
button,” a bell chimed a few times, and his hands
floated away from the wheel.
A sky vs. a lane
The computer taking over felt just like when you engage cruise
control. There’s a bit of whoosh as the speed changes and the
truck corrects itself to the center of the lane, and then
everything evens out.
It’s not a dramatic switch until you notice the small
things, like Grigsby’s hands in his lap for a few seconds or his
feet flat on the floor even when the truck is accelerating. For
the most part, it felt normal — relaxing, even.
While looking at the road, I started to notice just how bad
the human drivers around us are compared to the even keel the
truck is keeping.
You see cars drifting in-and-out of the center of their lanes,
even if they’re staying inside the lines. Some cars
fly by, while other cars are going slower than we are. Otto
sets its software at the match the speed for trucks on that
stretch of highway. In this case, it’s going 55 mph.
As the interstate became a bridge and my view shifts to
rooftops and blue sky on the left of the cab, I started to
realize just how much of a miracle it is for the truck to
not be flying off the edge.
Grigsby’s hands hover in
case he needs to grab the wheel as Otto navigates a section of
interstate with a lot of crossing bridges.
Biz Carson/Business Insider
Its combination of sensors and cameras have to not only
detect that it’s on a bridge, but also know not to direct the
truck toward that empty expanse of sky. The empty area to the
left of the truck doesn’t mean an empty lane, but actually
something much more fatal than that.
In Pittsburgh, where Uber (now Otto’s parent company) is testing
its self-driving cars, a Bloomberg
reporter documented how the self-driving system chimed to get
the safety driver to take the wheel for a few seconds as
they crossed a bridge in a test ride.
“Bridges, unlike normal streets, offer few environmental
cues—there are no buildings, for instance—making it hard for the
car to figure out exactly where it is,”
Max Chafkin wrote. Uber’s car flipped back to autonomous
a few seconds later.
With that in mind, I thought I’d be terrified when I
looked at the rooftops rushing by as we wound our way into San
Francisco, but really I was in awe.
This is a technology where an error could cost lives, yet I
thought my odds of going off the bridge were probably about the
same as if I was behind the wheel myself. Or even
less.
F
rom our steady perch in the self-driving
truck, it was the human drivers that looked out of place and
chaotic — not the truck that was miraculously driving
itself.
