Driverless Cars and, Oddly Enough, California’s Legislature in Harmony with its Voters

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There are plenty of reasons on this side of the argument too. 

The testing we’ve seen thus far has been extremely limited; it’s silly to assume that real life experiences with tens of thousands of vehicles in the nation’s most populous state wouldn’t be different. Californians have not been happy with San Francisco’s experiment with driverless taxis; the prospect of scaling that up to 40- and 60-foot long vehicles while the technology is still so new is more than disconcerting.  Most of the testing has been on the open road; the congested conditions of California’s great metropolises will pose a more formidable challenge.

Does California really want tens of thousands more vehicles on the roads that depend on the electric power grid, a grid that already shuts down or falters, with brownouts and blackouts seemingly all the time? If we’re already telling the individuals who drive personal EVs to go without charging their cars, and to go days or weeks without driving because there’s no power for them, does it really make sense to encourage the onboarding of thousands of trucks with ten or twenty times the draw on the grid of those comparatively tiny Teslas, Bolts, and Niros?

Legislators read the newspapers; they’ve seen the frequent reports of electric car fires, where these same batteries spontaneously explode for no apparent reason at all, sometimes sinking an entire cargo ship in the process. They read about how Nikola has given up trying to repair their electric batteries in the field; they’re recalling all affected electric trucks and asking owners to return them to the manufacturing plant while they look for a cure. 

Perhaps legislators read about how these fires often can’t be put out by any means available to firefighters; they just have to be allowed to burn themselves out.  Perhaps some politicians are extrapolating the logical conclusions from these stories, asking “do we need a 53’ truck full of cargo, burning on the shoulder of a busy California highway for three or four days because the fire can’t be put out, and the carcass can’t be moved until it cools, a couple weeks later?”

And maybe the legislators are thinking of how the nation employs millions of truck drivers, a time-honored path toward a decent and well paying career, and either a generally stable union job as an employee or a promising “owner-operator” job as an independent contractor.  Can a nation in recession, and a state like California that’s literally bleeding job opportunities, afford to eliminate such a dependable career opportunity from their constituents?

Perhaps some politicians, seeing all the challenges they already have with electric vehicles, are reasonably thinking that adding the driverless aspect on top of all that might be a bridge too far. Let’s see if we can fix the spontaneous combustion issue and the underpowered grid issue, before jumping on yet another bandwagon in the same dangerous parade.

And this brings us to my second big question.  How many times in one’s life does the typical person have a heart attack or stroke, versus how many times does a computer system experience a network downtime, a blown hard drive, a software glitch or a power outage?

The human driver can indeed experience a heart attack or stroke; it happens.

But at both our home computer and our office desktop, we have all experienced plenty of times when the software has frozen up or failed completely, sometimes in the middle of a job.  We have all had a cellphone or tablet quit without notice.  We’ve all experienced blackouts while we were in the middle of an MS Teams or Zoom meeting, or while writing an article or populating a spreadsheet.  In some areas, this happens several times per year.

We’ve all gone shopping, filling our carts and getting ready to check out, only to find that the store’s network went down so there’s no way for their cashiers to ring you up.

What if such an event happens when a driverless truck is rounding a mountain on the 118 or zooming up and down the hills of the 23 or the 101?

What do we do, if an unplanned, unexpected software failure hits while thousands of unmanned 80,000 lb vehicles are barreling along interstates like the 405, the 10, or the 710 in the middle of the night, or crawling bumper to bumper in the midst of busy rush hour traffic?

And finally, as much as we want to avoid asking this question, we must.

The Senate passed the ban on Monday, September 11. 

What if we had networks of driverless trucks all over the state, or even all over the country, and al-Qaida, or some other group like them, was able to plant a terrorist at a company headquarters, ready and now able to create thousands of costly and deadly vehicle pile-ups with a single software change or communication signal?

We live in a dangerous world today. We have to think of these things.

Technology can be our friend, but it can also be our enemy. Until certain risks can be completely ruled out, the wise heart chooses caution.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

Image: Linneakornehed, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0

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