Self-driving cars: Watch a self-driving car test drive
Fasten your seatbelt, get in your self-driving car and stay informed. For the Detroit Three automakers, much of the technology is already in place.
- May Mobility, a self-driving startup in Ann Arbor, gave the author a look at Michigan’s first truly self-driving car.
- Currently, there are no vehicles on sale that are legally considered self-driving.
“Are we going to drive alongside other humans?” I say, my voice a few octaves higher than usual.
“Oh yeah,” Edwin Olson, founder and CEO of self-driving shuttle company May Mobility, told me from the middle row of his Toyota Sienna.
As I pass him, I see the minivan’s steering wheel turning from side to side, partially obscured by the empty driver’s seat. The vehicle heads towards a busy road.
“Oh, that’s amazing.”
“This is a real self-driving car,” Olson said, much to my surprise. After all, I had just interviewed him for over an hour at May Mobility’s headquarters and watched him pull a self-driving car to the curb. The plan was to hit the road.
“Oh, yeah,” I squeaked.
I’m sitting in the back seat next to Frank Renwick, May Mobility’s vice president of marketing and communications. Next to the CEO is a videographer from Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, who poses questions to the CEO and adjusts camera equipment. The front row is empty.
“Here in Ann Arbor, we have a lot of different environments. We start with this light industrial area, and then we move to the high-traffic residential areas, the highways. That way we mix things up,” says Olson, as the captain of a ship without a captain.
May Mobility operated four vehicles donated by Toyota Motor Corporation in Detroit as part of a free service, but that program ended in June. On September 10, May Mobility partnered with Lyft to launch a self-driving car pilot program in Atlanta, marking the first public deployment of self-driving cars.
The company relies on automakers to determine basic vehicle design features that can support the technology it adds while complying with state and national regulations.
The vehicles that circulated in Detroit had safety drivers, but the vehicles that May Mobility uses for testing and invite-only rides like mine do not have safety drivers.
My breathing quickened as he explained what an unprotected turn was like as our car attempted the turn. That’s an example of a self-driving car entering a road with cross traffic without a clear right of way.
“Unprotected turns are the classic ‘hard problem’ for self-driving cars, because that’s where the greatest risk is and the vehicle needs to see and plan for the best course of action,” Olson explains.
The wheels shake ominously behind him.
“Okay,” I reply.
The minivan moves steadily along the road, but the self-driving car does not speed. Olson explains how a camera under the rearview mirror captures different angles of the traffic light. The car knows that the traffic lights at an intersection are synchronized, so if the view of one traffic light is obstructed, the car will guess whether one is green and the other will also be green.
I haven’t heard it at all.
“You seem surprised,” I confessed, and everyone turned to stare at me. “I thought this would be more calming, but it wasn’t.”
I haven’t been in a self-driving car in years, and my first experience wasn’t a good one. A tree branch broke and fell into the path of a self-driving shuttle on a controlled trajectory, bringing the vehicle to a halt for the first time in its orbit. All the passengers, including members of the media, including myself, were thrown forward by the sudden stop. I thought to myself, “If you can’t manage the branches, this is clearly not suitable for real roads.”
Eight years later, I’m sitting in the seat farthest from the steering wheel of a self-driving car, surrounded by moving cars driven by unsuspecting humans.
At one point, the vehicle comes to a stop in the center lane near an intersection and is about to make a left turn. A car approached from afar and I completely stopped breathing. What if the self-driving car doesn’t get there in time? What if it tries to overtake us and at the exact same moment a May Mobility minivan tries to turn and we crash?
Renwick asks if he’s okay in a voice too quiet for the recorder to hear. He is only concerned about my health and knows the car will be fine and even executes left turns perfectly. But his expression is enough to make me laugh and shake off my nerves for a moment.
We continued our interview and the car delivered us safely and without incident to the coffee shop that Olson had selected on the app he used to summon the May Mobility vehicle.
