thank you I have one of the best jobs in
the world
and I’ve been doing it for 30 years
people will send us and there’s 450 of
us at the Virginia Tech Transportation
Institute people send us their cars and
let us test them and try to figure out
how they work and when they won’t work
what the unintended consequences are
we’ve been doing this for 30 years we
work with 100 sponsors 14 of the car
manufacturers many suppliers to do this
it’s a fantastic job the other reason I
have a really great job as I’m getting
older you can tell by my beard I’m
almost 60 that means I can say pretty
much whatever I want and in addition to
that I have a great job because I have
tenure which means I can absolutely say
whatever I want so what I’m going to
tell you today is what we all believe is
a revolution from media from you know
partnerships created every day and and
and amazing things happening but I would
from my humble point of view it it’s
really more of an evolution because
we’ve been doing this so for so long
so what we really need to ask ourselves
is when autonomous vehicle technology
will be nearly perfect and as I’ll talk
about in a few minutes it needs to be
nearly perfect and you know there’s a
lot of Advocates to say it’s already
there
you know we’re killing thirty seven
thousand plus people a year on our
roadways we really need to get this out
as soon as possible those are all good
points that need to be considered but it
really needs to be nearly perfect
because you’re not going to get in a
robotic taxi if you have 15,000
fatalities occurring with robotic taxes
you’re just not going to accept that so
when will it be nearly perfect
technology experts say between three and
ten years at V TTI we think probably
five years from now it’ll be nearly
perfect that doesn’t mean you’re not
gonna see it you’re gonna see it in
really kind of limited operations and
I’ll talk about that also in a few
minutes so it’s really going to take
five years before it gets there now you
also have to keep in mind that we’ve
been we’ve been testing automated
technology for 20 years you know you
heard about automatic electronic braking
we started testing that 20 years ago and
so what that means is it takes
a great deal of time for things to get
deployed and so we started testing
automated braking over 20 years ago it
became available for the first time in
the US and in 2013 and if you as you see
our friends from the Insurance Institute
for Highway Safety they predict that
there will be 50 percent deployment of
this system by 2026
and if you follow that the chart up 90
percent deployment by 2040 you know that
that’s a ways away and you’ve got to
understand that this technology is
accepted by everybody the car
manufacturers made a voluntary standard
to get this on all cars within five
years so this is about the fastest that
you can deploy something and get it
through the fleet that’s something to
consider what is the shortest time to
deploy technology well about 50% of
vehicles you’ll see with substantial
automation in about 13 years after it’s
perfect assume nothing else bad goes
goes wrong and about 90% in 27 years so
it’s a little ways away one of the
things you have to consider that these
systems might not be deployed even that
fast because there’s a number of factors
that are involved you know trust in
automation and and the desired own and
automated vehicle is relatively flat
over the last few years people talk
about Millennials don’t want to even own
cars anymore they just want to do
rideshare and things like that but
Millennials and everybody else has been
buying cars at a very brisk pace
manually driven cars the last few years
as the economy’s gotten better and you
know in addition to that you know we
hear about uber and lyft and things like
that so maybe we we don’t need cars you
can use car share ride share all of
those things and they’re tremendous
services but you have to keep in mind
that they are less than point two
percent of all the troops in the US even
despite their tremendous success so it’s
it’s gonna be a while but the biggest
factor is risk perception and risk
perception is how risky you think
something is and so
what what that means to you is there is
an actual risk associated with doing
something and then your perception
thereof and people are sometimes really
terrible about judging actual risk you
know it examples include commercial
airline safety where there’s a real fear
of seating control over a situation most
people realize that flying commercially
is safer than driving a car if you did a
survey of the US today they would say
it’s twice as safe and but in reality if
you look at fatalities over a number of
years it’s really two thousand times as
safe and so that’s an example where the
perception of risk is drastically
different than the actual risk for
whatever reason manual driving gets a
buy when it comes to risk we literally
kill a hundred people every day on our
roadways but people really don’t view it
as that risk if you compare that to
shark attacks
you know if somebody gets attacked by a
shark off the coast of North Carolina or
someplace it’s it’s a tragic event it’s
in the mainstream media for days people
get off the beaches we kill more people
in cars every day than sharks have
killed people in the US and the last 200
years that’s the difference in risk
perception so what’s gonna be the
difference between perceived and actual
risk for manual driving there’s lots of
studies over a number of years that show
that it’s going to be a thousand to one
and so what does that mean to you but
what that means to you is a vs cannot
crash very often in fact they have to be
really nearly perfect and if you do the
numbers but kill 37,000 people each year
manually the risk perception for
autonomous vehicles is going to be a
thousand times greater so that means to
be perceived as equally dangerous we can
only kill 37 people a year that’s a
really that’s a really tough problem so
another factor to consider is our
drivers terrible you just I just told
you 30 other people have told you 37,000
people died on our roadways 94 percent
due to human error drivers terrible I’d
say yes and no one thing to consider is
the average driver in the United States
has a serious crash every seventeen
point nine years serious being police
reported a good driver that chooses to
drive alert attentive and sober on every
time they drive reduces that risk by a
factor of three so what that means to
you is there’s a substantial portion of
the population that will go through an
entire lifetime of driving and never
crashed never have a serious crash so
for moral or ethical reasons or whatever
reasons how many times can a v’s crash
to make those people equally as safe an
autonomous car is there in a manual car
zero right if you go through an entire
lifetime of driving and you never crash
because you’re a really good driver you
don’t want to get in a robotic taxi that
kills 15,000 people a year so that’s
that’s a big issue there are other
factors to consider you know when when
you talk about abies and and when
they’ll be deployed for example the
presence of manual driving right so I
told you the reason I didn’t take the
other chart and go out to a hundred
percent is there’s very few things in
the transportation world that are a
hundred percent
seatbelts have been around for decades
if you survey people they know they save
lives you know we’ve had laws passed
we’ve had public awareness campaigns
we’ve had all kinds of things yet
between 10 and 20 percent of people
still don’t wear seatbelts automation
the automatic transmission was really
invented over 70 years ago and it’s been
extremely popular a lot of cars have
automatic transmission but even today 5%
of the vehicles on the road still have
manual transmission
and you can still go to a dealership and
buy one in many dealerships and a manual
transmission is not more expensive than
an automated transmission yet people
still buy them that’s because people
drive for fun they just like to drive
but how does that affect the system okay
if you have manual drivers on the road
it greatly increases the variability of
what you have to deal with if every
vehicle on the road were autonomous and
all followed the same rules the air
problems much simpler problem than with
drivers drivers do not follow rules the
average speed on our interstates is
greater than the speed limit you see
people doing illegal turns illegal
maneuvers all the time we did a study at
Virginia Tech a few years ago which was
essentially how many people stopped for
a for a right on red after stop which is
the law well the answer is less than 50%
that doesn’t surprise you too much but
probably what doesn’t surprise you is
the average speed for the people that
don’t stop is 11 miles an hour and
there’s huge variability some people are
up to close to 20 miles an hour and it’s
very hard for autonomous vehicles to
really get to really develop the
intelligence to be able to predict all
this human behavior but there will
always be manual driving so when will
autonomous vehicles be deployed well
you’re seeing them now really and it’s
just perhaps not when as much as where
you can you can drive hands off feet off
or at least get both lateral and
longitudinal control at this point in
five production vehicles and so it’s
already happening but what but when is
it really going to be perfect enough
where you can watch the movie or take
your eyes off the road not sooner than
five years for nearly perfect technology
if you add to that 13 years for the the
50% point in market penetration of
autonomous vehicles that gets us out to
2035
so by 2035 even though you will have
experienced a lot of technology
whether it’s a robotic taxi in a city or
highway driving or coming later would be
bad weather and rural driving 2035 half
the cars on the road will be
substantially automated to get to the 90
percent point you got to go out to 20 49
and so that’s that’s really a long time
from now and and I can’t emphasize this
enough if we don’t do it right you can
add five to ten years to those numbers
because if they crash if they crash more
than is acceptable governments
individuals or they’re not going to
accept the technology and they’re gonna
slow it down because they’re either not
going to buy it or they’re gonna have to
legislate to protect the public and so
that could get you out to 2050 four or
2059 and so I’m not I’m not here to try
to about here to try to say that this
isn’t a great thing it is a tremendous
thing and I’m not here to say that we
don’t see the benefits there are
tremendous safety mobility benefits for
disabled populations and underserved
populations it’s going to be great we
just have to do it right and it’s going
to take a while that’s that’s what we do
at the Virginia Tech Transportation
Institute thank you
[Applause]
you
the world
and I’ve been doing it for 30 years
people will send us and there’s 450 of
us at the Virginia Tech Transportation
Institute people send us their cars and
let us test them and try to figure out
how they work and when they won’t work
what the unintended consequences are
we’ve been doing this for 30 years we
work with 100 sponsors 14 of the car
manufacturers many suppliers to do this
it’s a fantastic job the other reason I
have a really great job as I’m getting
older you can tell by my beard I’m
almost 60 that means I can say pretty
much whatever I want and in addition to
that I have a great job because I have
tenure which means I can absolutely say
whatever I want so what I’m going to
tell you today is what we all believe is
a revolution from media from you know
partnerships created every day and and
and amazing things happening but I would
from my humble point of view it it’s
really more of an evolution because
we’ve been doing this so for so long
so what we really need to ask ourselves
is when autonomous vehicle technology
will be nearly perfect and as I’ll talk
about in a few minutes it needs to be
nearly perfect and you know there’s a
lot of Advocates to say it’s already
there
you know we’re killing thirty seven
thousand plus people a year on our
roadways we really need to get this out
as soon as possible those are all good
points that need to be considered but it
really needs to be nearly perfect
because you’re not going to get in a
robotic taxi if you have 15,000
fatalities occurring with robotic taxes
you’re just not going to accept that so
when will it be nearly perfect
technology experts say between three and
ten years at V TTI we think probably
five years from now it’ll be nearly
perfect that doesn’t mean you’re not
gonna see it you’re gonna see it in
really kind of limited operations and
I’ll talk about that also in a few
minutes so it’s really going to take
five years before it gets there now you
also have to keep in mind that we’ve
been we’ve been testing automated
technology for 20 years you know you
heard about automatic electronic braking
we started testing that 20 years ago and
so what that means is it takes
a great deal of time for things to get
deployed and so we started testing
automated braking over 20 years ago it
became available for the first time in
the US and in 2013 and if you as you see
our friends from the Insurance Institute
for Highway Safety they predict that
there will be 50 percent deployment of
this system by 2026
and if you follow that the chart up 90
percent deployment by 2040 you know that
that’s a ways away and you’ve got to
understand that this technology is
accepted by everybody the car
manufacturers made a voluntary standard
to get this on all cars within five
years so this is about the fastest that
you can deploy something and get it
through the fleet that’s something to
consider what is the shortest time to
deploy technology well about 50% of
vehicles you’ll see with substantial
automation in about 13 years after it’s
perfect assume nothing else bad goes
goes wrong and about 90% in 27 years so
it’s a little ways away one of the
things you have to consider that these
systems might not be deployed even that
fast because there’s a number of factors
that are involved you know trust in
automation and and the desired own and
automated vehicle is relatively flat
over the last few years people talk
about Millennials don’t want to even own
cars anymore they just want to do
rideshare and things like that but
Millennials and everybody else has been
buying cars at a very brisk pace
manually driven cars the last few years
as the economy’s gotten better and you
know in addition to that you know we
hear about uber and lyft and things like
that so maybe we we don’t need cars you
can use car share ride share all of
those things and they’re tremendous
services but you have to keep in mind
that they are less than point two
percent of all the troops in the US even
despite their tremendous success so it’s
it’s gonna be a while but the biggest
factor is risk perception and risk
perception is how risky you think
something is and so
what what that means to you is there is
an actual risk associated with doing
something and then your perception
thereof and people are sometimes really
terrible about judging actual risk you
know it examples include commercial
airline safety where there’s a real fear
of seating control over a situation most
people realize that flying commercially
is safer than driving a car if you did a
survey of the US today they would say
it’s twice as safe and but in reality if
you look at fatalities over a number of
years it’s really two thousand times as
safe and so that’s an example where the
perception of risk is drastically
different than the actual risk for
whatever reason manual driving gets a
buy when it comes to risk we literally
kill a hundred people every day on our
roadways but people really don’t view it
as that risk if you compare that to
shark attacks
you know if somebody gets attacked by a
shark off the coast of North Carolina or
someplace it’s it’s a tragic event it’s
in the mainstream media for days people
get off the beaches we kill more people
in cars every day than sharks have
killed people in the US and the last 200
years that’s the difference in risk
perception so what’s gonna be the
difference between perceived and actual
risk for manual driving there’s lots of
studies over a number of years that show
that it’s going to be a thousand to one
and so what does that mean to you but
what that means to you is a vs cannot
crash very often in fact they have to be
really nearly perfect and if you do the
numbers but kill 37,000 people each year
manually the risk perception for
autonomous vehicles is going to be a
thousand times greater so that means to
be perceived as equally dangerous we can
only kill 37 people a year that’s a
really that’s a really tough problem so
another factor to consider is our
drivers terrible you just I just told
you 30 other people have told you 37,000
people died on our roadways 94 percent
due to human error drivers terrible I’d
say yes and no one thing to consider is
the average driver in the United States
has a serious crash every seventeen
point nine years serious being police
reported a good driver that chooses to
drive alert attentive and sober on every
time they drive reduces that risk by a
factor of three so what that means to
you is there’s a substantial portion of
the population that will go through an
entire lifetime of driving and never
crashed never have a serious crash so
for moral or ethical reasons or whatever
reasons how many times can a v’s crash
to make those people equally as safe an
autonomous car is there in a manual car
zero right if you go through an entire
lifetime of driving and you never crash
because you’re a really good driver you
don’t want to get in a robotic taxi that
kills 15,000 people a year so that’s
that’s a big issue there are other
factors to consider you know when when
you talk about abies and and when
they’ll be deployed for example the
presence of manual driving right so I
told you the reason I didn’t take the
other chart and go out to a hundred
percent is there’s very few things in
the transportation world that are a
hundred percent
seatbelts have been around for decades
if you survey people they know they save
lives you know we’ve had laws passed
we’ve had public awareness campaigns
we’ve had all kinds of things yet
between 10 and 20 percent of people
still don’t wear seatbelts automation
the automatic transmission was really
invented over 70 years ago and it’s been
extremely popular a lot of cars have
automatic transmission but even today 5%
of the vehicles on the road still have
manual transmission
and you can still go to a dealership and
buy one in many dealerships and a manual
transmission is not more expensive than
an automated transmission yet people
still buy them that’s because people
drive for fun they just like to drive
but how does that affect the system okay
if you have manual drivers on the road
it greatly increases the variability of
what you have to deal with if every
vehicle on the road were autonomous and
all followed the same rules the air
problems much simpler problem than with
drivers drivers do not follow rules the
average speed on our interstates is
greater than the speed limit you see
people doing illegal turns illegal
maneuvers all the time we did a study at
Virginia Tech a few years ago which was
essentially how many people stopped for
a for a right on red after stop which is
the law well the answer is less than 50%
that doesn’t surprise you too much but
probably what doesn’t surprise you is
the average speed for the people that
don’t stop is 11 miles an hour and
there’s huge variability some people are
up to close to 20 miles an hour and it’s
very hard for autonomous vehicles to
really get to really develop the
intelligence to be able to predict all
this human behavior but there will
always be manual driving so when will
autonomous vehicles be deployed well
you’re seeing them now really and it’s
just perhaps not when as much as where
you can you can drive hands off feet off
or at least get both lateral and
longitudinal control at this point in
five production vehicles and so it’s
already happening but what but when is
it really going to be perfect enough
where you can watch the movie or take
your eyes off the road not sooner than
five years for nearly perfect technology
if you add to that 13 years for the the
50% point in market penetration of
autonomous vehicles that gets us out to
2035
so by 2035 even though you will have
experienced a lot of technology
whether it’s a robotic taxi in a city or
highway driving or coming later would be
bad weather and rural driving 2035 half
the cars on the road will be
substantially automated to get to the 90
percent point you got to go out to 20 49
and so that’s that’s really a long time
from now and and I can’t emphasize this
enough if we don’t do it right you can
add five to ten years to those numbers
because if they crash if they crash more
than is acceptable governments
individuals or they’re not going to
accept the technology and they’re gonna
slow it down because they’re either not
going to buy it or they’re gonna have to
legislate to protect the public and so
that could get you out to 2050 four or
2059 and so I’m not I’m not here to try
to about here to try to say that this
isn’t a great thing it is a tremendous
thing and I’m not here to say that we
don’t see the benefits there are
tremendous safety mobility benefits for
disabled populations and underserved
populations it’s going to be great we
just have to do it right and it’s going
to take a while that’s that’s what we do
at the Virginia Tech Transportation
Institute thank you
[Applause]
you
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