If you’d driven your shiny and new steam-powered automobile on the roads of late 19th-century Britain, someone would have walked in front of you with a red flag. As the Locomotives Act 1865 clearly stipulated (with much Victorian capitalization, and my emphasis):
“Secondly, one of such Persons, while any Locomotive is in Motion, shall precede such Locomotive on Foot by not less than Sixty Yards, and shall carry a Red Flag constantly displayed, and shall warn the Riders and Drivers of Horses of the Approach of such Locomotives, and shall signal the Driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist Horses, and Carriages drawn by Horses, passing the same […] ”
Legislative change happens slowly: That Act wasn’t repealed until three decades later, in 1896.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Fast-forward to today, and the march of autonomous mobility is being held back by the red warning triangles you see ahead of broken-down vehicles by the side of the road.
Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch wrote about Aurora Innovation’s problem with US federal safety regulators back in January, and I meant to comment then. Thomas Black at Bloomberg then picked up the tale this week, giving me the nudge I needed.
Rebecca summarizes the federal safety rules that are expected to happen when a truck breaks down on a US highway:
“Truck drivers activate their hazards and have 10 minutes to put out reflective safety triangles as a warning to other road users. The first triangle goes 10 feet behind the truck facing oncoming traffic. The second goes 100 feet behind the truck. And the third goes 100 feet ahead of the truck or 100 feet behind the truck but off-center. The driver might adjust those positions if the truck is pulled over on a curve or a blind spot.”
Obviously if there’s no driver, then there’s no one to climb down from the cab and carefully place little red triangles. Aurora Innovation (and Waymo, which was also developing trucks at the time) asked for an exemption and proposed fitting bright beacons on the cab that could be triggered instead. Those beacons might work just as well (or even better) for traffic approaching the front of the truck, but they wouldn’t be particularly useful to traffic approaching the truck from behind. The trailer would obscure the cab from view, and there wouldn’t be any fancy beacons on it, as neither Aurora nor Waymo would own, control, or build the trailer. Also, as the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) noted in its rejection of the exemption request, beacons physically attached to the vehicle would not be sufficiently visible if it was stopped on a curve.
Bloomberg’s Thomas Black doesn’t seem convinced, commenting that:
“The best argument the FMCSA made for rejecting the exemption was that the beacon’s light can’t bend around a curve. In the somewhat rare case where a truck would be forced to pull over just past a sharp curve, it’s plausible that a triangle could be set out at the apex of the curve and give motorists better warning than the beacon. Then again, compelling a driver to walk on the shoulder of a curvy highway adds more risk.”
I have more sympathy for the FMCSA’s position but also feel that this case helps to highlight a broader set of issues.
Self-Driving Cars On Public Roads Remain A Difficult Proposition
Forrester consistently argues that autonomous driving on public highways is a hard problem, one that won’t be solved for most roads in most conditions any time soon. But it is a soluble problem at which vast amounts of time, money, and brainpower are being thrown. We’ll get there.
It’s the fuzzier stuff around the edges that most of the brilliant engineers at well-endowed startups are ignoring, dismissing, or are not yet even aware of. Something, for example, does need to inform other road users about a hazard. Today, that something is a red plastic triangle, placed on the road by a human hand. It doesn’t have to be a red plastic triangle, and it doesn’t need to be placed by a human, but something else would need to be found to take on that warning role: bright beacons, vehicle-to-vehicle alerts such as those that drivers of modern Volvo cars get in Denmark, or some more low-tech approach? And in the world of robotaxis, more thought needs to be given to the mundane background work involved in cleaning and charging vehicles. As I commented in my coverage of Tesla’s Cybercab announcement:
“If a passenger leaves a mess in the back of a cab, how quickly and accurately can the broader system detect that mess, take the cab out of service, and direct it to a nearby cleaning facility? If there’s no driver, you really don’t want the next passenger to be the one who gets into a filthy vehicle and has to report the problem — or leave a thumbs-down review!”
In the headlong rush to solve the exciting technical challenge of autonomous mobility, we mustn’t lose sight of the supporting tasks that will make this autonomous future clean, safe, cost-effective, and practical.
As always, if you have your own perspectives to share on addressing these small but critical supporting tasks, please schedule a briefing and tell me all about them. If you’re a Forrester client and want to discuss (or challenge) my thinking on this topic, please schedule an inquiry.
