Musings on Freedom, Transportation and the Automatic Automobile

Jul 5th, 2006 | By Penny Sleuth Contributor | Category: Technology

As we reflect on the precious and seemingly ever-dwindling freedoms available in this country, there’s at least one freedom we cherish that’s not enshrined in the Constitution (a document that’s apparently “void where prohibited by law”).

I’m speaking of freedom of movement. Most Americans love cars, because cars give the sense of an ability to go anywhere, anytime — even on a whim.

I find some irony in this whenever I’m trapped in the creep — a twice-daily phenomenon often wrongly called, “rush hour.” (It’s longer than an hour and nobody’s rushing.) The creep is a direct result of the huge favoritism of building roads over passenger trains in this country.

If you doubt the favoritism of cars over trains, I suggest that you research magnetic levitation trains and ponder why China and Europe have these and we don’t. They’re faster than cars and rival planes for many intercity trips. Regardless, we have automobiles and we have them in abundance.

I always thought the automobile was somewhat optimistically named. After all, while mobile, it’s hardly automatic. Now it looks like that’s about to change.

The Daily Mail reports that Volkswagen has unveiled a car that truly drives itself without human assistance, and does so at speeds up to 150 mph. It drives well enough to traverse sharp curves the tires can barely hold.

It’s called the VW Golf GTi “53 plus 1.” It uses a combination of radar and laser sensors to monitor road conditions. The system computer is smart enough to address real-time road conditions. Like less-sophisticated vehicles on the road today, it uses a satellite-linked GPS system so the car can “know” its location anywhere on the planet at any time.

When the car was publicly demonstrated to journalists at Wolfsburg, Germany, people in attendance were invited to design various test courses on-the-fly with road cones. The car never hit any of the cones.

A Volkswagen spokesman said: “It really is a self-driving Golf. It steers, brakes and accelerates. And it races through handling courses independently. It can accomplish this at full performance and at the limits of its capabilities.”

Of course, it is one thing to have a car that performs at this level of functionality on a closed test course. It’s quite another to have such a car functioning in real-world traffic.

Just consider the fact that a car traveling in the twice-daily creep must react to the sudden and sometimes unpredictable stops and starts of multiple other vehicles. When changing lanes, it’s necessary to gauge the surrounding pattern of traffic. For example, if you’re moving from the right lane into the middle lane, it’s possible that a car in the left lane is doing the same thing at the same time.

Then there’s the whole matter of nonvehicular obstacles. When something suddenly comes into the street, what is it? A child? An animal? Or simply a piece of debris blowing in the wind?

An immediate and extremely sophisticated level of pattern recognition is necessary to make the correct decision. No level of fault tolerance is acceptable here.

What of variations in weather, such as sudden torrential rain, snow or sleet? If something hits the windshield hard, the correct reaction is quite different depending on whether it’s a hailstone, a road stone, or some other object.

I’m not saying that the truly automatic automobile is an impossible dream. Far from it; I fully expect such cars to be on the road before 2020. Such automobiles will require a computer brain that approaches human intelligence in its sophistication, coupled with sensing apparatus that’s the equivalent of our own.

Both of these are approaching far more rapidly than most people realize. The noted computer scientist and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has evaluated progress in computing capacity, and concluded that computers with human equivalent processing power will be achieved before 2025.

There’s plenty of evidence that this is attainable: Already, computers can perform medical diagnosis better than 90% of physicians. (If you had an unknown illness, would you choose such a computer over a doctor randomly selected from the phone book? I would.) They’ve invented things that have been issued patents. They run factories. Those are but a handful of the available examples.

But there’s an irony in all of this. While I expect automatic automobiles to be on the road by 2020, I expect that we will have automatically piloted flying vehicles five years sooner. Why?

The capability to manufacture such vehicles in small quantities already exists. One prominent example comes from Moller International (MLER.OB: OTC BB). (Note: Neither I nor Agora has any financial interest in this company.) However, that’s not the real reason that automatically piloted flying vehicles will see commercial deployment ahead of automatically piloted cars and trucks. The real reason is one of complexity: Flying cars will pretty much have the “road” to themselves. By linking into the air traffic control system, they’ll be able to steer clear of the altitudes and flight patterns of conventional planes.

Because they won’t have to deal with the various hazards and split-second decisions that drivers of ground-based cars must make every day, the brains piloting such flying vehicles can be relatively simpler.

A few years after this technology has proven viable in air, it will finish its migration out of the laboratory, coming down-to-earth and onto our roads.

While I do not consider Moller to be an attractive investment at this time, I am watching another company offering personal flying transportation with great interest. They expect to roll — er, fly –it out next year.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
july 05, 2006

Penny Sleuth Contributor

The Penny Sleuth also features commentary by other financial analysts, small-cap experts, investment gurus and an array of contributors from various fields and occupations. Their diverse insights and contrarian investing ideas are hand selected by the Penny Sleuth editors.

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