What It Is Really Like Being Inside A Self-Driving Car On Our Public Roadways

I got into a discussion recently about the mysteries of self-driving cars.

It happened while I was on a cross-country flight, prompted by the person seated next to me asking me what it is like to be inside a self-driving driverless car, especially once the autonomous car is underway and rolling along on a public roadway. The question arose after she had noticed that I was doing some work regarding autonomous cars and we traded stories of what we each do for a living.

There definitely appears to be growing interest about what happens within a car that is a self-driving car.

I’ve been a rider or passenger in numerous different brands and models of driverless cars and done so over quite a number of years, partaking directly in their evolution too, so perhaps I’ve become somewhat ho-hum and nonchalant about the whole thing.

It would be akin to having flown on airplanes lots of times and eventually you tend to zone-out about the interior of the airplane and the various rituals and activities that typically take place. I recall when my children were very young that they were amazed at flying on planes, and after years of doing so, they today take it in stride as does any frequent flyer.

Of course, airplanes are nowadays a routine and regular way to travel. In spite of the rare instances of plane crashes or untoward incidents, we all tend to consider flying as a relatively low-risk or nearly risk-free way to travel. Sure, when the flight gets bumpy in turbulence, we have a momentary flash of concern, or when we see something odd taking place it gets the hairs up on the back of our necks, but that’s generally few and far between occasions while flying these days.

Rare For The General Public To Have Seen One

One of the reasons that people are curious about what it is like to be inside a self-driving car is due to the rarity of actually coming in contact with such a beast.

The overall U.S. population has not had a chance to see a self-driving car with their own eyes, in-person, in spite of the various roadway trials taking place, let alone sit inside one.

The tryouts are in just a select few cities, plus there aren’t that many of the driverless cars roaming around. Furthermore, the experimental vehicles are typically being run just during daylight hours. And, they are often kept in the same geofenced area, restricted to certain streets and neighborhoods that the driverless car repeatedly roves around in.

You can usually spot a driverless car by the bulbous equipment placed on the roof of the car, often a racking system that contains sensors, such as LIDAR units.

The older versions of these devices were pretty much bulky and made the car standout right away, you could see one of these bulked-up cars coming from a significant distance away by the comic-looking bulb-like cones on the rooftop. Now, the manner of blending the sensors into the top and throughout the body of the car is increasingly looking streamlined, so much so that you could not only fail to notice a driverless car by its stack of equipment, you could be fooled by a conventional car that has a ski rack or other stuff atop it that would make you guess it might be a self-driving car.

Hint: If you want to impress (fool) your friends and neighbors that you are seemingly using a self-driving car, go ahead and mount a roof rack on your vehicle, place some old audio speakers and any dome-like items on the rack, use black cord or wire that resembles electrical lines, and voila, they will believe you’ve upgraded to an autonomous car.

Insiders Can Take Test Drives Readily

Those that are involved in the self-driving car industry are often able to go for a drive in the latest versions of autonomous cars by attending industry conferences. Usually, any event focused on autonomous vehicles will have a few automakers or tech firms that are providing tryout rides during the conference.

What’s kind of interesting is that the grandiose Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been providing rides in driverless cars in Vegas each year, undertaken by some of the self-driving car companies that have booths at the annual extravaganza, and yet it seemed like this year the attendees weren’t as enamored of going for a ride as they had in the prior years that it was offered.

I have a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon.

The progress of self-driving cars from an outward and even inward perspective of the car has been relatively slow to showcase any visibly new aspects, and therefore if you went in a driverless car last year or the year before, going again would not necessarily present you with any visually dramatic difference.

The differences are generally under-the-hood, so to speak, namely that the AI system and the sensors are getting better at performing the driving chore. That’s a harder aspect to witness when you are a passenger in such a vehicle.

In fact, let me disappoint you right now by mentioning that you aren’t going to see lots of blinking lights and fancy looking doodads when you get into a driverless car.

Some people assume that the interior must look like the inside of a space capsule, jammed with all kinds of switches, buttons, LED displays, and the rest. Sorry, the inside is rather unimpressive and bland looking, not especially standing out in comparison to any conventional car.

If you go to a closed track or proving ground where they are toying with new advances in various sensors and devices, you would be more likely to see unusual looking electronics either inside or outside and mounted onto the car. Plus, the odds are that there would be an engineer sitting inside the driverless car, typically equipped with a laptop or specialized electronics-reading equipment, and they would be carefully scrutinizing numerous displays.

That’s the kind of experience that people assume they will have when getting into a driverless car. Those versions of driverless cars at the closed courses are not ordinarily the ones that are being used on the public roadway efforts. After some new equipment has shown merit at the special track, it will get migrated onto their roadway models and get merged into the mix of on-board systems.

For those of you that have gotten into a driverless shuttle, of which they are gradually being experimentally deployed at airports, hotel areas, retirement communities, and the like, you have a chance to witness self-driving tech.

Though that is generally the case, let’s also point out that usually the shuttle is limited to how fast it can go and limited as to where it can go. At times, you probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a “smart” driverless shuttle in the wild versus a “dumb” shuttle used at a theme park that is confined to a fixed track and has no particular smarts infused into it.

The Imagined Experience

Here’s what I believe most people envision when contemplating undertaking a self-driving car experience or journey.

They think about getting into a self-driving car that is going to navigate and traverse public roadways, doing so at human driving speeds, and find its way around everyday obstacles, along with stopping at stop signs, and veering away from bike riders in the street, etc.

All of this being done by an invisible hand, they assume, and for which as a passenger it would be amazing to see that a “ghost” appears to be operating the steering wheel and pedals of the car.

I might need to provide further disappointment, unfortunately, since it is usually the case that a human back-up driver is in the self-driving car with you.

The human back-up driver is supposed to be closely watching the road and be ready in an instant to take the driving controls over. This is a key precautionary and safety aspect that makes sense while the driverless car AI is still an unproven commodity. As such, you might get into a driverless car and be let down to see that a human driver is sitting in the driver’s seat.

Say what, you ask, I thought this was a driverless car.

The smiling driver, akin to any driver you might find in a standard Uber or Lyft ridesharing car, will tell you they are there for your safety and you can just pretend that they aren’t there.

Because these public roadway tryouts are of keen interest to those that happen to ride in such a car, the human back-up driver is usually trained not only about how to takeover the controls of the car (usually referred to as a “disengagement”), if needed, but they also are trained about how to explain to everyday passengers the magic of the self-driving vehicle.

For those of you that are techies, keep in mind that the back-up driver is unlikely to be a techie, and thus their explanations about the AI systems and sensors will be rather simplistic and rudimentary. Even if you somehow get lucky and the back-up driver is an engineer for the firm, they are usually not allowed to divulge any high-tech secrets and will therefore be quite circumspect in what they say about the self-driving car and its capabilities.

I’ve seen some passengers become very crestfallen upon scurrying into a self-driving car and then immediately changing their tone and demeanor the moment they realize that the driver’s seat won’t be empty. Sorry, but it is for your protection and for the protection of any other cars, pedestrians, bike riders, and the like that might get nearby the self-driving vehicle.

As an aside, there are some self-driving cars that have remote accessible driving controls, allowing the human driver to be in the backseat of the self-driving car, or even not inside the car at all, but that’s rather uncommon and you’d be unlikely to experience such a setup.

Before I get into additional detail about what its like to be inside a self-driving car while it is on-the-go, I should add some additional points about the risks involved.

Keep in mind that the self-driving car could go awry at any moment. The AI might mistakenly choose to run a red light or fail to avoid an obstacle in the roadway. Assuming there is a human back-up driver inside the self-driving car, you have no guarantee that they will takeover the controls in time to save the vehicle from getting into a car accident.

All in all, you are taking a sizable risk being inside a self-driving car, for now, far beyond the kind of risks that you absorb when you for example get into an airplane.

Of course, if you are at risk while inside the self-driving car, we can logically extend that there is a corpus of risk for those that come near to the self-driving car too. Risk is floating everywhere in the case of self-driving cars, encompassing anyone inside the driverless car and anyone nearby, including drivers in other cars, passengers in other cars, pedestrians walking nearby, motorcyclists coming along, scooter riders, bike riders, and so on.

There are some in the industry that are highly critical of these public roadway tryouts and insist that we should not have self-driving cars on our public roadway at this time. They would say that we are allowing all of us to participate in an experimental venture, whether we are aware of our willingness to do so or not.

The counterargument includes that if the automakers and tech firms only did simulations and closed track efforts, this would either not lead to producing true autonomous cars or would greatly delay their advent. In that sense, if you assume that the sooner driverless cars are readied for public roadway use that the more the lives today being killed or injured in car accidents will be reduced, some argue that it is a necessary balance of taking on risk for the overall good that can come from the existing efforts.

It is a contentious matter.

What Happens In The Inner Sanctum

In any case, let’s return to the notion of going for a ride in a driverless car today, doing so on public roadways, and for which you need to be cognizant of the risk that you are taking when you do so, and that even if there is a human back-up driver involved that it does not mean that your risk has gone away.

As earlier stated, the interior of the car is not likely to wow you. Overall, it will seem to be a conventional car.

Another disappointing aspect (sorry!), involves the AI interaction.

In the future, it is envisioned that an AI system will dialogue with you, akin to how Alexa or Siri does today, and be able to discuss with you where you want to go, along with possibly offering suggestions about the driving journey that will take place. This use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and socio-behavioral elements pertaining to the driving act and passenger interactions does not yet exist in any robust manner.

Today, you can anticipate that the human back-up driver will interact with you rather than the AI system, plus you might be able to use a crude mobile app to convey to the driverless car some simple aspects such as the street address or location that is your desired destination.

I often characterize the first-time experience of going for a ride in a driverless car as consisting of several distinct stages or phases that the passenger will undergo. You might be familiar with say the stages of life or the stages of grief that psychologists describe when someone suffers the loss of a loved one.

I’ve come up with the “eight stages” for first-time driverless car riders:

1. Excitement

2. Trepidation

3. Awe

4. Questioning

5. Realization

6. Complacency

7. Cautionary

8. Realignment

Here’s the scoop on the eight stages.

Upon first entering into the driverless car, you’ll be excited about the prospects of not only going for a ride with a machine at the wheel (kind of), but also experiencing something historic. Presumably, years from now, driverless cars will be ubiquitous. They will be considered mundane and nothing to write home about.

Meanwhile, you’ll be able to tell those that will listen that long ago, you got a ride in a driverless car, before there were driverless cars.

As earlier alluded to, after settling into the self-driving car, you will realize that there is (likely) a human back-up driver sitting there in the driver’s seat. You’ll still be able to see the steering wheel moving on its own, most of the time, perhaps all of the time, yet admittedly having a person there takes the air somewhat out of the excitement.

Once the driverless car starts on the journey, you are bound to have some moments of trepidation.

Today’s AI driving systems are not usually as adept at driving a car as a human would during the even routine aspects of driving. You’ll realize that the car appears to be taking extraordinary precautions, often coming to a full stop at stop signs, the kind of full stop that you actually come to a complete halt, wait a moment or two, and then proceed. This is in contrast the human used rolling-stop that most of us see and do all the time.

The trepidation shifts into awe, once you decide that it seems like the car is doing an adequate job of driving, akin to a novice that is unsure about being on the roadways and often is skittish at the wheel.

You’ll at this juncture have lots of questions about what the AI can and cannot do as part of the driving task. The human back-up driver can usually answer those questions, at least at a high-level.

You’ll then adjust your earlier expectations and have a realization of what today’s self-driving cars can actually do. This is followed often by a sense of complacency. You are sitting in a car and it is taking you to where you want to go. Assuming that nothing untoward happens, the journey gets boring.

If there are any hiccups or close calls during the trip, you’ll shift into a cautionary mindset.

Finally, assuming the trip goes without incident, you’ll get out of the driverless car at your destination and realign your thinking. It wasn’t a knock-your-socks off kind of experience. No sensational or dire aspects (hopefully).

Conclusion

For first timers, if you ask them afterward whether they’d go for a ride in a driverless car again, usually their answer is “it depends.”

Anyone in a rush to get to their destination is unlikely to clamor for a driverless car for their riding trip, since the AI systems are currently programmed to be extremely cautious. Also, without an interacting AI voice system, and with the human back-up driver present, the ride is nothing seemingly extraordinary or astonishing per se.

If you have all the time in the world, and you want to brag about your trip (and willing to take the risk), you’d aim to go again.

That’s what it is like to go for a ride in a self-driving car of today.