Watch Out There's a Blind Guy Driving!

     When I was growing up in Alabama as  a kid, I always knew I was going to get, upon turning sixteen, a high-axle, shiny red, knobby wheeled, 4 x 4 truck with one of those big wenches on the front and cool looking roll-bars in the back. The fall guy truck was my inspiration. I know I had a hot wheels version of the famous 4 x 4 and played with it often in the sandbox out in front of our old schack on Old Spotlight Road near Peterman, AL. A nice shiney 4x4 is not what we had at home. Two cars served as transportation for my family in the early 80’s. We had an old fifty-eight Ford and a white station wagon that showed every speck of Alabama red clay it passed through.  Later, my parents bought a very used blue 1969 Chevrolet S10 truck for $200. I remember driving out to a friend’s of my parents’ house to buy the old blue beater. Well, it was mostly blue.  In scattered spots the old truck’s paint was peeled and a funny orange primer peaked through. The back right fender had a large rusted hole in it, but the side steps behind the cab were in working order. The cab was white, and it had fog lights toward the front of the top of the rust pitted cab that I don’t think ever worked the entire time we had the vehicle. We rode in the back on the way home from Beatrice, Alabama, feeling the cool Alabama fall air on our faces. Our family used it as a junk truck, hauling firewood, taking trips to the landfill, cleaning up around our ten acre property and a practice vehicle for my brother and I. It wasn’t a 4 x 4, but if you let the clutch out easy on the Straight 6, while jamming on the gas you could do some fish tails on those red dirt roads! There was more than one field in Old Salem, AL that may had a muddy circle carved out by the tires of what came to be known as the “Blue Bomb”.

     My brother and I would come up with all manner of excuses to drive the Bomb.   Taking out the trash, or just driving up to the fork in the road, we would find a way to get behind the wheel. I’d drive there, and my brother would drive back, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that I wouldn’t be getting that 4 x 4 when I turned sixteen. I never exploded the Blue Bomb, but leaned it in a couple ditches once or twice. On top of that, driving made me a nervous wreck. So around age thirteen or so, I convinced myself, with a little help from my parents, I probably wouldn’t be driving my red 4 x 4 to the creek banks of South Alabama during my high school years. I wouldn’t call it devastating, I always kind of knew I wouldn’t be driving, but finding out you can’t drive in our society of cars was a blow.

      Now thirty years after I decided I wasn’t going to drive, and after years of missed opportunity and difficulties that come with not having a vehicle in the United States, it is starting to look like one day I may be able to get in a car and go somewhere on my own!  One after another car manufacturers like Nissan and BMW are announcing they will be producing more car models that rely on artificial intelligence, GPS and other technologies to move people around on the road. Google is testing autonomous cars in some cities, and Uber has designs on a self driving fleet in the near future. The 2018 electronic showcase in Vegas featured self driving lift cars and a self driving passenger bus.  

 As a blind person, the thought of driving a car and going where I want to go, when I want to go, is one that literally baffles my mind. What would I do? Where would I go? Would I go ride the Alabama back roads with a cooler filled with beer beside my old dog in the back of my autonomous Blue Bomb replica? Or, would I go ride the strip in Panama City, Florida trying to revive some old Spring Break heyday in my robot car. Maybe, one day I could use the dedicated self driving car lane they are installing from Seattle to British Columbia to go check out some of the famous BC Bud.  I’m not sure I’d do any of these, and when I really think about it, would I even get in a self driving car. I guess that all depends on the level of autonomy. Thankfully, the Society of Automotive Engineers are here to help assist me in deciding what the right time is to put my life in the hands of a robot on wheels traveling 65 mph+ down the road. Turns out, there are 5 levels of autonomy. Well six if you count zero as a level, but debating if zero is actually a number is beyond the scope of this article.

Level Zero - No Automation  

     The car is always driven by a person, even with enhanced warning systems. This won’t help a blind guy unless the car beeps before it hits something, but that won’t work when I’m flying down the road. “No thanks, I’ll stick with the shuttle!”

Level One - Driver Assistance  

     The car uses collected data to steer and/or accelerate/decelerate only, with the understanding that the human driver will do all other driving tasks. “Oh don’t mind me I forgot to turn on my blinker, didn’t know that turn was coming. Oh, and I can’t see that finger you’re waving at me.”

Level Two - Partial Automation   

     In this case the car is doing more than one driving task related to steering or acceleration/ deceleration, but the human is still on the hook for the rest.  “I’d still be really worried about the steering, but I might ride around the block in a Level Two Automated car. “Hey kids, dad’s driving!”

Level Three - Conditional Automation  

     The main word in this level is intervening. The car does everything, except stop for the cute kid or kitty in the road. “Oh sorry, I ran your kitty over; my automated car is only level three. My bad!”

Level Four - High Automation

     The car does everything. Even if a person doesn’t intervene to swerve around the cute kitty, the car will. A level four car is about the level I’d consider putting my life in the hands of an AI, but would probably stick to just going to the grocery store, but could I find my car in the parking lot to leave?

Level Five - Full Time Automation

     The car does all tasks related to driving. “Sorry, officer it was the AI going 20 over the speed limit.”

 Really though, I think these cars are a bit late to the game.  Besides the Blue Bomb, my family had another favorite car, this time in a German sentient car named after an insect. The first autonomous car was made in 1968 by Volkswagen. The precocious red, white and blue Volkswagen Beatle name Herby was driving the streets decades before Tesla was a glint in Elon Musk’s eye. The car in the Disney movies has super hero capabilities and appears in six feature films that take the bombastic beetle on heroin adventures all around the world. The popular movie series would bring together actors and actresses like Dean Jones, Patricia Hearty, Richard Paul, Claudia Wells, Nicky Katt and Douglas Emerson. Herby Goes Bananas is an understatement.  In Herby Goes to Monti Carlo, he drives upside down in a tunnel to pass the lead car to win the race. That’s not “bananas”, that’s “nutty”.   I’m not sure I’d trust my trip to the store with Herby. On more than one occasion, he overrides his carbon based masters and goes on his own trip. Herby can’t talk, so I would have a hard time knowing where I was if the car went off on his own. In one movie, Herby even has a sex drive that would surely get him in trouble in 2018, chasing another VW Beatle all around the town. That’s all I need, my car sexually harassing other cars in the parking garage, sparking the first hashtag “Me Too” by a car at the hands of Herby.  

Strangely, it has taken Volkswagen almost another fifty years, since they unveiled Herby, to introduce their electric autonomous Volkswagen Bus.  VW unveiled their fully autonomous electric futuristic bus known as the ID Buzz a year ago in 2017 at the North American International Auto Show. Similar in shape to the iconic 1960’s VW bus, the ID Buzz is an eight passenger minivan. With a unique design, the Buzz will switch into autonomous mode after the driver pushes the steering wheel forward in the cockpit and their seat turns around. Ultrasound sensors, area view cameras, radar sensors, laser scanners and a front facing camera will all point Herby’s autonomous cousin down the road. The Buzz will drive 375 miles (600 kilometers) on a single charge, and it only takes 30 minutes to charge. No longer would hippies have to hold the steering wheel while the driver hits the bong.  Just push the steering wheel and turn around and puff-puff give with seven of your closest thrill seekers cruising down the road in your Buzz. Yeah, they named it Buzz.  I say thrill seekers, because to sit in a van and hang out like you’re not driving down the road is an exercise that seems years in our future.   Volkswagen is just about on that same time schedule for mass production of their autonomous cars as other auto makers, who say they’d like to be selling one million electric autonomous cars by 2025.  The ID Buzz in 2018 is more a concept car than something we’ll see on the road anytime soon.            

Right now most self-driving cars are at level two or three, but brands are working hard to be the first to have a fleet of self driving cars. As testing continues, we can expect to see more and more self driving cars on the road by 2020, especially in areas with no pedestrians. By 2023 experts believe there will be choices for more affluent consumers to choose cars that will switch between fully autonomous and manual modes. Experts say, cities will need to be redesigned to accommodate the AI drivers and what about fast food drive-through windows. “Please drive ahead to the next window.” Will cars know which window and how to far to drive. “No sir, I said you can pick up your death in a bag at the next window!” Just a short 12 years from now in 2030 we could be at the point where most cars on the road are self driving. This is when I would consider driving solo in an autonomous car.

     We won’t be outfitting the Blue Bomb at any rate. By the time we sold the Bomb, the thing looked like it had been literally hit by a bomb. The back fender had rusted out, someone had thrown a piece of firewood through the back window, the heater never worked and the blue paint had given way to that ugly orange primer in many places, making the truck appear it had some type of truck skin ailment. The family thinks it probably ended up driving the Green Mile to the crusher after my Dad passed away in 1998. Besides learning how to drive, looking back I learned a lot from that ugly truck. I learned I would never drive a car, which was one of the first things I had to deal with out in society when it came to my blindness. I learned I loved my Dad no matter how embarrassed I was being dropped off in that ugley truck. Perhaps most importantly, I learned from my dad, who drove that truck with a dogged persistence when his regular work truck would break down, no matter how bad you didn’t want to and how bad the vehicle gets, you have to get up and keep driving down that windy road of life no matter what. I have to hope in the days of autonomous cars these life lessons are still available for young drivers as they were for me in an old 69 Chevy truck.