Safety First

Having just received my first car, the wonders of software in vehicles excites me. One of the main software components in cars today is the ability for the car to park without assistance from the driver. This software must obviously be rigorously tested before being used in commercial cars. The question comes, however, of how safety authorities handle this software. Could an officer site the driver of a car for hitting another car while it was being controlled solely by the parking software? If so, would the driver be able to sue the company that designed the software for inadvertently causing the accident?

According to an article on PCWorld by Leo King, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is charged with investigating such incidents. After Toyota discovered acceleration problems in its cars in 2009, an investigation was opened to discover the cause. No conclusive proof was found that cited computer systems as a plausible cause for the malfunctions, but questions remained about the dependability of the increasing amount of software control in motor vehicles. In the same article, King quotes Louis Lanzerotti, a distinguished research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lanzerotti claims that it will “be difficult for NHTSA to keep pace with the technology.” He calls for the NHTSA to “develop much better knowledge by engaging with the industry.”

In another article written by Evan Ackerman on IEEE Spectrum, research is presented by a group at Carnegie Mellon that proves mathematically that autonomous cars (cars controlled entirely by software) cannot cause an accident. The tests began with two cars traveling in opposite lanes of a road and then expanded, including more cars and more difficult maneuvers such as lane changes or exiting a highway. The software is still limited in what it can do; the article provides the humorous example of a moose jumping off of an overpass onto the hood of the car, which would an unexpected event for either a human or computer driver.

The “car of the future” used to be a joke that would appear in some cartoons and television shows around the 1970s. As technology moves forward, however, it seems like society is moving ever closer to a real car of the future. After all, if graduate students can design a program to accurately control cars with one hundred percent accuracy, how far away can we be from flying around with the Jetsons?