With increasing levels of digitisation, the average automobile is more of a robot than a car. Does India risk losing out on this fundamental change?
Recently, this columnist found himself in the sunny southern Portugal, driving the latest iteration of German car-maker BMW’s 3-series sedan. The carmaker has always prided itself on installing some of the latest technologies in its car. One of the most advanced features on this new car was something called ‘Reverse Assist’. Now cars have had reversing cameras and sensors for a while, something that has clearly removed the need for us to look over our shoulder while driving backwards. But this was another level of automation. After driving into a dead-end road or a situation that involves a difficult reverse in the car, which incidentally is not cheap, you do not have to overthink or manoeuvre. That is, you just keep your foot on the brake pedal and your hands off the steering wheel. The car remembers the last fifty metres it travelled and safely reverses you back to more or less where you started.
As the steering wheel turns by itself, you find yourself staring at awe at the car doing this. This is despite the increasing levels of computerisation on cars. This is not just the computers changing gears for you in an automatic by calculating engine speed but monitoring driving conditions, the levels of friction on the tires and fuel economy. The fact is that no modern car, other than the most basic ones that you buy nowadays, has much of a physical link between the pedals and the engines and some have done away with a physical steering connection as well. Much like all modern commercial aircraft, ‘Fly By Wire’ cars are rapidly becoming ‘Drive By Wire’.
So why the need for a driver at all? In fact, your columnist has been in a fully autonomous car developed by Ford. The car drove itself around Ford’s Research and Development campus in Dearborn, Michigan. This was on public roads and it took a turn on the road where it had to calculate oncoming traffic. This was two years ago, and that time many cars that are currently available even in India, had added a degree of automation to themselves. Today, there are some automated cars and more will be sold on the Indian market with close to Level 2 automation. That is not just cruise control but things like adaptive cruise control and automatic land changing as well as automatic braking in emergency situations and lane assist. All of these means on a highway you can drive with your hands off the steering wheel while travelling at speeds in excess of 100 km per hour. Yet your car will maintain a safe distance from the car ahead of it, change lanes when you turn the indicator and even observe and calculate for vehicles in the other lane, holding itself perfectly in the centre of the lane and brake automatically in case there is a sudden impediment.
It can do all this even if your hands are not strongly on the steering wheel. However, for legal liability reasons, it does not allow you to keep both your hands off the wheel. In case you do that for over a few seconds, the pressure sensors, having known you have lifted your hands off the wheel, will set off visual and aural alarms. Legal liability is an important issue after all; if the car is automated who is liable for an accident? The driver or the car manufacturer?The argument that the car manufacturer is responsible could easily be made because the car does do almost everything itself. Therefore, fully autonomous cars have been only slowly introduced on to public streets and recent incidents such as a crash by an autonomous car that killed a pedestrian in Arizona in the United States have only intensified scrutiny.
While the Arizona crash might have happened to a human driver as well, whenever a new technology is introduced, it is under higher scrutiny, even if it turns out to be safer. Let’s look back at another technology mentioned earlier in this article, the ‘Fly By Wire’ technology on commercial aircraft. When European manufacturer Airbus introduced the technology with the Airbus A320 in the mid-1980s, there was actually a rash of accidents of the plane in its first few years of service, including an Indian Airlines plane in Bengaluru. But today the A320 is the best-selling commercial plane in the world with several thousands in service, including hundreds in India. So autonomous technology will become par for the course in some countries where traffic is more orderly.
However, what is almost certain is that despite manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Volvo introducing some of these automation technologies on the vehicles they sell in India, this country stands to lose out. Nobody in their right minds can argue that other than a few stretches of expressways and may be in a couple of cities like Chandigarh, traffic in India is orderly. And drivers, no matter what vehicle they are operating, are in deep, passionate love with their mobile phones. There have been cases of drivers video-calling while at the steering.
Traffic enforcement is woefully poor across the country, the sheer volume of vehicles overwhelming traffic police. And even if the police want to enforce traffic rules, the citizenry of this country might rise up. This is notably happening in Pune right now where political parties, civil society and intellectuals are up in arms because the new traffic commissioner wants to enforce helmet usage for two-wheeler riders. If this was not tragic it might have been funny.
The fact is that traffic in India is chaotic and it might be decades before computers become smart enough to scan through the immense number of variables that traffic here entails. But even basic levels of automation that are currently available will likely not work in India. Using Volvo’s ‘City Safety’ technology in India is irritating simply because it activates whenever you get cut off badly by a motorcycle driver or a cow crosses the road blissfully unaware. Of course, a senior politician feared automation because it would take away jobs, but that may be years away even in the West. Not having automation at all will affect job growth in India. Because this technology will in a few years permeate its way down to small cars. If India wishes to become a world leader in cars, technology and manufacturing, it has to work towards enabling automation.
And that involves cleaning up traffic and the political and social will to do that. But we can only hope for the impossible, because India’s traffic is emblematic of this country, chaotic and lawless with a lack of enforcement and bad politics. So ten years from now, when India loses out in automobile manufacturing, you will know why that happened.
(The writer is Managing Director, The Pioneer)
