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Taking A Robot Car For A Spin Into The Future

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Caille Millner
Photo: Alexandre Garnault, 29, technical leader in automated driving systems at Valeo, takes his hands off the wheel while demonstrating the company’s autonomous car for columnist Caille Millner. (The San Francisco Chronicle, Caille Millner)

Autonomous cars provoke strong reactions. They sound like the future, but the future feels terrifying these days.

Autonomous cars sit within this paradox. It’s hard enough to surrender control to another driver. Now we have to surrender it to a robot?

Indeed we do. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has issued autonomous car permits to 62 entities; it granted its first permit for a fully autonomous, driverless car in October. Some carmakers anticipate having fleets on the road as soon as next year.

Curious about how the robots’ driving lessons are going, I decided to go for a spin in one of the latest models. Valeo, a 96-year-old French company that’s grown into a global automotive parts supplier, offered to give me a lift in the Drive4U, their demo “autonomous car for city driving.”

One of Valeo’s specialties is driving-assistance sensors and radars — if you’ve ever been in a car that beeped when the driver pulled too close to the curb, you’re already familiar with the technology.

As it turns out, that’s the same technology you can use to build an autonomous car. (Sensors are part of the kit that a robot car uses to “see” what’s around it.) That’s how Valeo became one of the many, many companies currently engaged in the world’s autonomy arms race.

At their San Mateo office, I inspected the vehicle that I’d be riding in alongside Alexandre Garnault, Valeo’s 29-year-old technical leader for automated driving systems.

“It looks normal, no?” Garnault said with pride. “No different from any other car on the street.”

The vehicle really did look like a regular Range Rover, at least until I climbed into the passenger seat.

Propped against the dashboard — just above a label admonishing me to fasten my seat belt — was a computer screen. Garnault started the car and pulled out into San Mateo traffic, keeping his hands on the wheel. I watched the bubble of our vehicle on the screen float between fields of green, blue and red.

“Those are the different obstacles in our surroundings,” Garnault said.

I meditated on the mapping data for a moment. As of yet, no manufacturer has surmounted the final obstacle in the promised revolution — a car that’s fully autonomous, under all conditions, at all times.

Garnault nodded when I mentioned this to him, but he didn’t seem overly concerned.

“I’ve taken this (vehicle) through downtown Paris,” he said. “I’ve taken it across America on a 20,000-mile road trip. We have to make adaptations in the system for the different countries, the different environments, but that’s all part of the work.”

Then he casually removed his feet from the pedals and his hands from the steering wheel.

We were midstream on a four-lane road in downtown San Mateo, but there was no pause or twitch in the car’s motion. I felt no difference in the car’s motion or its direction. It was as if he’d never been driving at all.

Mildly panicked, mildly thrilled, I looked back at the dashboard computer’s mapping data. Just as it was doing in real life, the bubble on the screen was easily navigating the obstacles.

Later on, Amine Taleb, Valeo’s research and development director, told me that the car doesn’t use the dashboard computer’s information at all — it’s all for the benefit of people like me.

“Our No. 1 priority is safety, but we also think about how we can gain people’s trust in autonomous cars,” Taleb said. “So we try to give them information about what the car is doing. It’s a way to build trust.”

When Taleb came clean about the real purpose of the computer dashboard, I felt a little manipulated, a little used. But he’s right: Watching the dashboard computer did make me feel better.

You know what else made me feel better?

The moments when the car reacted to bad driving better than most humans do.

At one point, our autonomous car was chugging up to a four-way stoplight. The light changed, and the driver to our right made a wide turn that could’ve clipped us. The Drive4U braked, allowing the driver to correct course, before I’d even had a chance to react.

“Did you do that?” I asked Garnault.

He had his hands off the wheel again. “Nope,” he said with a grin.

Valeo is so confident of the future of autonomous cars that it has already started development on an in-car virtual reality system for “entertainment and interaction,” so you can see your children back home or take your elderly family members along with you on a road trip.

I think there’s still some way to go when it comes to persuading most people to let go of their grip on the keys. But, as someone who would much rather use my own driving time to read books or — let’s face it — check Instagram, this is one task I’m happy to let the robots do. They’ll be ready very, very soon.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner

https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Taking-a-robot-car-for-a-spin-into-the-future