Sunny autonomous car futures faces some clouds

AUSTIN — The cruise to autonomous transportation is on track, but first we’ve got to get past some roadblocks.

That’s the takeaway from SXSW Interactive, the tech portion of the Texas confab that wrapped Tuesday and once again drew engineers, executives and lawmakers focused on steering society through a mobility revolution.

While there remains a general feeling of technological inevitability about self-driving vehicles, industry experts remain concerned about the shift’s looming logistical, legal and social ramifications.

“The vehicles will be ready by 2021, but will society?” said Bill Ford, chairman of Ford Motor, which along with a number of other automakers and tech companies have set roughly that date for the unveiling of a commercially viable self-driving car.

Interviews and SXSW lectures put a spotlight on a few big hurdles, which ranged from  asking politicians  to find consensus to programming machines to have a heart.

Who gets killed?

Ford said those building the transportation of the future need to look at “the ethics of autonomy,” which includes how they direct vehicles to act in an emergency.

“Who does the car hit, does the car try to save me?” he said. “And what happens if (car companies) made different decisions about that?”

Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler, raised the same question in his speech but added that these were philosophical questions that shouldn’t just be discussed among engineers.

“These are questions for society at large, and we have to find general ethical agreements,” he said. “But we shouldn’t overstress this. It will be extremely unlikely these vehicles would have to weigh this dilemma often.”

More than 30,000 people die each year from traffic accidents in the U.S., and more than a million globally. Autonomous car advocates argue the tech will drive that number down drastically.

Still, warns Ford, public reaction in the face of “high-profile accidents” could cause consumers to lose faith in a tech that is eating up billions of dollars in research and development.

Where are we going?

Many cars on the road today, from Audis to Teslas, feature a range of camera, radar and laser sensors that provide driver-assist features, from lane-keeping to self-parking.

But those sensors rely heavily on well-marked roads and good weather, which is why so-called high definition maps that provide digital scans of the world must make big strides to enable fully autonomous cars and trucks.

“This is not easy stuff, rendering one building in a point cloud represents terabytes of data,” said Edzard Overbeek, CEO of HERE, a Berlin-based mapping company owned by Daimler, Audi and BMW that has partnerships with companies such as Nvidia and Intel-owned Mobileye.

HERE has 400 vehicles out mapping roads around the world, but also processes data coming off sensors currently installed in millions of cars. The idea is that such geographical data can be crowd-sourced and updated in real time. If a car ahead of you has just skidded on a patch of ice, that information would be relayed to both you and your vehicle.

The competition in this space is intense. Alphabet’s Waymo has Google Maps. If Apple is indeed working on self-driving cars, it has its own mapping team. Uber has made hires to build out a mapping division. It remains to be seen if the result will be collaboration or chaos.

“This is like the Internet’s early days, in that many well-intentioned companies will not survive because you need scale,” says Overbeek, whose company’s mapping system currently is in a majority of vehicles. “The competition will keep everyone on their toes.”

Can messy atoms mesh with organized bits?

Most autonomous car experts agree that if a brand new city were created tomorrow, it would be easy to create a mobility system filled with robotic vehicles packed with powerful vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) sensors.

But the reality is far messier and includes the planet’s wide array of road conditions and human beings' divergent views on how soon we need this tech.

Crumbling infrastructures plague modern cities such as Los Angeles, while traffic chaos envelopes developing capitals such as New Delhi. Both would give computer-programmed machines a big headache.

The artificial intelligence needed to power autonomous cars “has to advance a lot to cope with non-rule-based situations,” said Padmasree Warrior, CEO of Chinese-based car company NIO, which used SXSW to show off a sleek self-driving car it plans to roll out in 2020.

While it’s fun to look at cars that tap into our sci-fi dreams, less fanciful engineering projects seems inherently more realistic. For example, automotive supplier Bosch is busy piloting a parking solution program with Mercedes in Stuttgart.

Using existing front and rear bumper parking sensors to scan for empty curbside spots as cars pass them, Bosch is looking to create a system that could sending updated spot availability to a driver’s infotainment system.

“In the next few years, you’re going to see more parking solutions offered up than complex freeway autopilot systems,” says Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch North America. “We are a ways off from all-weather, all-condition autopilot.”

Will lawmakers help or hinder an autonomous future?

The NIO Eve, which drew steady crowds all weekend, is both futuristic and idealistic. Videos touting the benefits of this small den-on-wheels showed a woman knitting and even sleeping while her car battled traffic on the way to work.

That reality is heavily dependent not just on big AI leaps, but also lawmakers pushing for its realization.

Currently, states are largely acting independently when it comes to allowing the testing of self-driving cars while they await federal guidelines from incoming Department of Transportation secretary Elaine Chao.

“We had 25 mayors here this week, some who are attuned to these technological advancements but others are seeing some of this stuff for the first time,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler.

Austin "likes being on the cutting edge," he adds of a city that is filled with cyclists zipping around town and Waymo self-driving cars testing on broad streets (but notably no Uber of Lyft cars, after city council members enacted transportation rules in 2015 that caused the ride-sharing companies to pull out of town).

Adler believes that in the near term it will be up to individual communities to both debate the merits of autonomy as well as assess the ability to pay for any needed infrastructure improvements. But, he added, ultimately federal regulators must push for a national approach.

“The outgoing (DOT) secretary (Anthony Foxx) issued guidelines that challenged these (car and tech) companies to work together, and I hope the new administration keeps that going,” Adler said.

Ford agreed, noting that if states had different rules self-driving cars could find themselves parked at the state line.

“It’s important we have a national standard for all this,” he said. “We can’t do it piecemeal.”

Follow USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava on Twitter.