hey everyone welcome back to Tech Talk I'm Julia Beauchamp I am here with
senior writer for computer world Lucas Marion as well as video editor Chris
Hebert he's behind the camera 2020 is supposed to be the year of 5g
there's gonna be plenty of use cases for it but right now let's talk semi
autonomous vehicles stick around so Lucas you covered semi autonomous
vehicles quite a bit a few years back right yes and so I want to know what was
the hype like a few years ago because now it seems like that tech is really
being in implement implemented that's the word it's it's a lot like comparison
but it's a lot like blockchain there was a hype cycle for a while and it's all
very real technology just like block chains very real technology it gets
hyped in the beginning and basically everybody's thinking all this is gonna
be fully autonomous driving in a few years and no it's not it's gonna be semi
autonomous driving and it is being rolled out because the cost of a lot of
these systems lie to our systems and radar systems and visioning systems and
the cars is car coming down plus automakers see the benefit of this as to
does the federal government so what's interesting is that a lot of the times
semi autonomous and autonomous driving I feel like is really tied to 5g but we
don't have widespread 5g right now but there's still semi autonomous vehicles
yeah because right now it's isolated to the vehicle itself there's a lot of
pilot programs around the country going on with the vehicle to infrastructure
communications which is what we really need to make this a fully capable
autonomous driving experience for Americans and that allows you to talk to
roadside infrastructure traffic lights that's something they're testing a lot
of yeah I would be in fact came out with a vehicle pilot for many of their
vehicles technology that allows it to talk to these traffic lights and
basically tell you when it's going to turn green so if you can imagine what
the endgame here is is that you eventually wouldn't need lights you
could come to an intersection and your cars would be perfectly timed to mesh
through that intersection without ever stopping oh my gosh that sounds so it
almost sounds futuristic well it obviously is features but it seems like
it feels like it should be in a movie about what the future looks like but
it's going to be a reality I don't know if I like that I think I like it's gonna
take a long time for me to get used to not driving my car
right I mean can you imagine approaching an intersection I guess eventually once
you become comfortable with it you won't even think about it but yeah at first I
think I'd be a little nervous approaching an intersection without
lights I mean I sit in the passenger seat of some cars when other people are
driving and I'm slamming on the imaginary brake so I can imagine being
in like my wife a backseat driver the other thing to think about is damn that
cloud computing has to be oh yeah for all those cars like if you think about
it if you know autonomous vehicles you know became widespread and everyone used
it and the infrastructure was there that's a lot of cars yeah that's a lot
of cars that are gonna have to communicate of each other so I think
definitely you know bandwidth and all that is gonna play a big part especially
with 5g I have a clip here me and Michael Simon from PC world we actually
went out and tested out actual 5g speeds let me pull it up real quick okay and
you can actually see this is a phone we got to use and just watch that needle so
that's download Wow and you're gonna see upload and just a second once that
finishes but you know with 5g you know with all that with all you know the cars
communicating communicating with each other and the cloud this is gonna make
it much more practical it's like my amplifier it goes to a lab right right
it's ridiculous okay so anyways that just gives a little
perspective you know about you know the connectivity that you know we're gonna
have to have once autonomous vehicles rolls out you know widespread yeah yeah
it's it's all Wi-Fi communications when you're talking vehicle the
structure vehicle the vehicle so your car is talking to mine my car can
predict when you're going to make a lane change when you put your turn signal I'm
just going to tell my car oh this car wants to make a lane change or wants to
exit the highway all useful information when you're trying to control traffic
and keep people from getting into accidents and some studies show that
autonomous vehicle technology can save as many as twenty one thousand twenty
one thousand live twenty one thousand lives a year in by 2035 I think it was
that's interesting because I feel like how it sort of stands now public
perception is that there's no way technology can be smarter than a human
driver but if anyone has driven in Massachusetts they would know that
perhaps that could be the opposite case yeah my calculators smarter than I am so
I'm it's not that I'm putting all my trust in this technology but after it's
been proven out obviously like any technology we become come to rely on it
it's going to have there's going to be a period where this technology is going to
have to be tested and unfortunately during that period you're going to have
drivers who are going to put too much faith in this technology we've already
seen deaths from this technology rolled out in Tesla's for example I think too
is I would imagine that once something is once we have fully autonomous
vehicles which I said earlier 2020 is supposed to be a hallmark year for 5g
autonomous driving not 2020 so much but I think it kind of is interesting that I
would imagine that once the car is a much safer and frankly probably better
driver than actual people I would imagine that traffic is a lot more
predictable and probably I would think a lot of highways and things would run
smoother I'm picturing not as much slamming on the brakes the vast majority
of traffic jams it's just a fact is caused by people who tap the brakes
while they're driving on the highway and it creates this ripple effect that's
true that because you how many times you've been driving on the highway near
like there's no roadwork what is causing this traffic yeah no overcapacity but a
lot of times it's just people tapping their brakes and it creates that ripple
effect that then creates a bottleneck yeah I find that
that always happens and then I get out of the traffic and there wasn't anything
there no it wasn't even an exit it sound like there was a crash there wasn't a
police officer was just people being slow yeah it's yeah exactly it's people
being overly cautious not giving enough room between the car in front of them in
themselves and truck drivers will tell you just you need to keep a certain
distance if you do that then you're not going to have to be slamming on your
brakes every ten seconds when the car in front of you slows down so that helps
but we're not going to program down into human beings but we can program that
into autonomous driving technology like adaptive cruise control for instance
that's interesting something I also actually heard maybe a few days ago on
NPR actually they had a segment on the marketplace tech program and they
mentioned that Amazon just made a huge huge investment investment in autonomous
or semi-autonomous vehicles and they basically invested a ton of money and in
a company that will make autonomous delivery trucks which I can imagine when
5g rolls out in big cities would completely change the way that your pack
and just get delivered absolutely that I've been I was writing about that four
or five years ago when there were trucks being piloted with autonomous driving
technology on board yeah I mean the safety the ability to track them more
accurately be able to predict the the when packages are going to arrive supply
chain technology it all fits into it
let's see so you've got one of the one of the things that has enabled this
technology to be rolled out in more automobiles because now you're seeing it
in almost virtually all car companies are enabling at least some form of semi
autonomous driving or semi autonomous technology in their vehicles like
lane-keeping like brake assistance and adaptive cruise control and a lot of
this is coming out as standard as well is because the price of the technology
is coming down so you've got Delphi and other big parts manufacturers
coming out with lidar detection technology and what that does what lidar
does it some light detection and ranging it paints a picture it uses lasers to
paint a picture of the surrounding environment up to I think in some cases
more than thirty meters away so it's telling the computer in your car this is
what this the scenery this is what the scene around my car the objects around
my car look like and then the car can use that to process how it drives how it
maintains itself on the ground the road I think the fact I actually just had a
rental car a few weeks ago I had to have a rental and it was like a brand-new
2019 Infiniti and they had in there some sort of driver assist and I was I mean
first of all too scared to touch it cause there's a rental car but I was so
floored by the fact that it's so commonplace and my car's not even that
old but I don't have that I'm so looking forward to I think the adaptive cruise
control is one of the things I'm looking forward to on my next vehicle because I
just now right now I put on cruise control and that's great but the traffic
the flow of traffic is constantly changing so I'm turning it off putting
it back on turning it off putting back on you don't get to use it as much as
you'd like if it's adaptive you can put it on and forget it and and then you're
not tapping your brakes all the time think of what that's going to do for the
flow of traffic that's a good point because I I do the same thing especially
when I'm driving long long doesn't says I just second troll and go man I I got
to get rid of my my old jalopy I gotta get some some new car I got I got to
upgrade I gotta upgrade one other thing I want
to ask real quick and this is kind of a good question and I didn't think about
this until I saw a comment actually from Joe Rogan Joe Rogan actually asked this
question will self-driving cars eliminate duis and that brings up that
you know can of worms you know what do we think autonomous cars is gonna do to
laws driving laws I mean you know then you have a whole question about
liability insurance and all that what do you guys think well I did I actually
wrote about this several years ago especially in terms of
insurance and because the question then becomes who's responsible for the
accident right of course is it the technology is it the vehicle
manufacturer if this is vehicle infrastructure was there some sort of a
glitch there that makes the government responsible or is it the driver because
they weren't paying attention today a lot of its kind of falling on drivers
shoulders because it's semi autonomous you are required to keep your hands on
the wheel and we know everybody does that right
Chris oh yeah yeah yeah nobody would ever sit in the passenger seat or read a
book I mean check check this out check this
out all right let me just cut to our screen here if we just look at this
video right here I mean you just type in self-driving car you seem to see motors
play read and relax so you have these people playing like chess like as
they're driving you have that you see them playing games and I'm like I just
feel like you know throw your autonomous vehicles great great but it's kind of
scary right I mean this is sophisticated technology and these people are acting
as if they understand it so well and trust us so they've dealt with it for so
long oh I just trust this implicitly Moe Tesla built this car I trust it because
it's Tesla you don't know anything about this vehicle other than you bought it
and you've read something in the owners manual or some article online but other
than that you're you're blindly trusting this technology I would never do that I
can't even imagine doing it it blows my mind no that's scary but actually back
to sort of how autonomous vehicles will change driving laws I think it would be
interesting to think about how it's gonna change the speed limits for
example oh yeah because I mean as it is no one's following the speed limit so I
think I feel like it could go either way and that autonomous vehicles there's
gonna be some sort of mandate of regulatory mandate that they have just
follow the speed limiter go you know no more than five miles over per hour over
the speed limit when they're passing a car or speed limits can just sort of
become irrelevant because all the cars are talking to each other yeah I'm
seeing an iRobot scenario here where the cars are traveling 200 miles an hour and
I was just I was just gonna say that it reminds me exactly of iRobot that's seen
when Will Smith takes his hands off the wheel and the woman's like oh you sure
you want to do that yeah cuz you going like 200 miles per
hour and the only way well it's the way around he puts it on manual control
right right she flips out because she's like I
you can't possibly drive this car at this speed right because I mean really a
machine can really only do that you know right make ones tiny little like yeah
you're dead you're dead so no III see I totally see that happening where the
speed limits will be able to increase because computers will be able to their
reaction times will be vastly faster than humans so I'm gonna maybe shift the
conversation a little bit we're sort of talking about you know our ideal perfect
scenario which like I said years and years away hovercraft
yeah perfect but I want to talk maybe a little more realistic like what do you
think we can expect to see in terms of semi autonomous driving in 2020 and what
and how we'll sort of 5g facilitate that change sure I I think did I mention that
out II had a test vehicle on summer several of the test vehicles using Wi-Fi
to talk to traffic lights I think I believe so okay anyways so you're going
to see more of that you're going to see more vehicle infrastructure
coming out pilots coming out where your vehicles can be able to tell you when
that lights gonna turn green so you're sitting at a light I don't know what
you're doing while you're sitting at the light but you know you have three
seconds now before that light turns green so you wake up and look around not
know it's just sleeping but let's say you're not paying attention you don't
have to get the hi guy behind you honking you because you're still seeing
at a green light but eventually that's gonna turn into like I said not even
having to stop at an intersection that's not happening in 2020 what is happening
that's going to be important is a lot of this autonomous vehicle technology for
safety purposes so automated braking most of the major car manufacturers have
committed to having that in place I think it's by 2020 I might be wrong
might be 2021 I was really happy to see that because that's huge you know
automatic braking technology keeps it keeps you from rear-ending the card that
slams on his brakes ahead of you and it's a lot like antilock brakes but
better so um I think that's what we're gonna see going to see more Lane
changing technology this stuff's going to become standardized on
so that you know you already know as you're driving along and you see those
little lights on the side view mirrors that pop on as you're passing them well
well that's in a sense that's the same thing it's a sensor that's using radar
to detect your car's presence next to it well you got to do then is to hook that
into the central computer system in the car which then tells you I can't change
lanes right now I will not let you change lanes right now because there's
some there's some vehicle next to you that's that's the next logical step so
it's already being deployed in a lot of vehicles at least the detection systems
now it needs to get tied into the central nervous system of the car that's
also really you know back to my rental that I had I'm very happy I have my own
car back frankly but it had something yeah I wasn't Lane Assist but exactly if
I turned on the turn signal it would start beeping if a car was in my blind
spot it was crazy nice but that does seem like a natural next step
it's brilliant technology and it just follows that you're gonna want to deploy
this you know it doesn't have to be perfect unless you're allowing the
vehicle to do all the driving right what it does is it alerts you to the
possibility that there's a danger next to you in front of you behind you
whatever and we packing up that all that stuff I have yet to test parallel
parking does not want to try that but that's all sensor technology and that's
a handing over control again to the central computer system in your car at
the very least I would love if someone could if the car could tell me when I'm
supposed to be cutting hard because I've watched people parallel I see it all the
time yeah except to parallel park on my street and I watch people parallel park
and I just want it I just want to tell them to start cutting mm-hmm like cut
the other way go so that would at the very least that
would be nice yeah you want to do it for me I mean you could yeah it's it's it's
I remember this in I never took driver's ed I think everybody else had to our
demo did but I remember being taught by my mother that as you back your car up
as you as you hit the halfway point on your car that's when you cut it hard to
go into the space and then as your front end is clearing the rear end of the car
in front of you then you cut it back in almost every time I get this perfect
parallel park oh yeah powder foot from the car
gotten very good at it living in the city but anyways you should teach
driving oh my goodness look I first of all I would have a ruler and every time
a person didn't use their turn signal I'd crack them on the knuckles it's a
little lever next to the steering wheel it doesn't well you can break your arm
lifting your finger to turn it on I'm like alright have you seen the what the
parity video a cop made about this brand-new turn signals yes a turn signal
it just blows my mind all the ones that go into the turn and then go oh I think
I'll use it as I'm turning the car and I'm like no it's not an afterthought
you're supposed to be telling the people around you that you're gonna turn
anyways autonomous vehicles will have turn signals Oh or they won't matter
because we won't be driving the car yeah exactly
no it's I'm sorry it's one of my pet peeves and you know that and people
running red lights through intersections like I'm more important than you and I'm
gonna clog this intersection because darn it all I deserve it I'm sorry
also will be solved yeah thank you so much Lucas for joining us sure love to
lending your knowledge and a little bit of your drivers edge thanks for having
me thank you and thank you everyone for watching this episode of tech talk if
you like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel
let me know in the comments how do you feel about autonomous and semi
autonomous vehicles how soon until you trust them on the road I don't know if I
do right now so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time