- Imagine a 747 crashing and
killing everyone on board.
Now imagine it happening once a week,
every week, spread out over a year.
If this were the norm, would
you set foot on an airplane?
This seems absolutely crazy,
but that's how many
people human drivers kill
in just the U.S. each year.
Globally, that number is over one million.
- Most of the accidents
are caused by human error.
Drinking and driving, distracted driving,
these are all human factors
that lead to accidents.
So, autonomous vehicles
can improve safety.
- Robot cars hold the promise of saving
tens of thousands of lives every year.
(suspenseful music)
But that is just one of the ways in which
they can utterly transform society.
Welcome to Uprising.
Fear not.
- The robots are already here.
- So, it's in autopilot now.
It's maxing out my speed
at 30 miles an hour.
And you can see the
cars on all sides of me
on the control panel here.
- Was that the car
breaking or was that you?
- That was the car breaking.
So, I haven't really done anything.
(light music)
- The world of transportation and mobility
is being turned upside-down.
So the question now is, as we go forward,
can we direct this
towards a better future?
- It's hard to imagine a
technology with greater capacity
to change the world than autonomous cars.
In addition to saving lives,
it could have massive
environmental benefits
by reducing congestion
and increasing efficiency.
- And we have, overall, a
city with much less land
devoted to roads, much less
land devoted to parking.
And we use those lands in a
way that people will enjoy,
whether it's park space or playgrounds.
It will mean that we have
better transportation,
more equitable access.
- And those are just the
changes we can think of now.
Many of the changes it will bring
are just unimaginable at this point.
Do you think anyone anticipated
drive-thru restaurants
or the suburbs when the
automobile was invented?
And on the topic of
unintended consequences,
it's just as possible
that autonomous vehicles
could actually make things worse.
- If our automated cars
are personally owned,
in other words, if we just
take these automated cars
and just superimpose them
on today's usage patterns
and ownership patterns,
it will lead to a future
in which the cars are used twice as much.
They'd use more energy,
they take more space,
probably lead to more sprawl.
And for the simple reason
that if the car is automated,
you don't have to pay
attention to driving.
You can treat the car as a hotel,
as an entertainment center, office,
and therefore, why wouldn't
you spend more time in it?
- People can commute for longer distances,
creating more congestion,
so we have to be cautious about that.
That could be a negative impact on cities.
- How society uses autonomous
cars will determine
the kind of future we have.
And to get the future we want,
we might need to change
how we think about cars.
- The beautiful picture of
sustainable transportation
of automated cars in the
future being positive
depends on two factors.
One is that we move beyond
personal ownership of vehicles,
and two, that the vehicles are pooled.
In other words, more than one person
is riding in them at a time.
Pooling really is the answer.
Optimus Ride is a company focused on
what we call geofenced autonomy,
so the ability to deploy
vehicles at low speed,
25 miles per hour or
less in a geofenced area.
That could include a industrial park
like the Brooklyn Navy Yard that we're in,
it could include a university campus,
these are all geofenced locations.
So we think that the introduction
of self-driving vehicles
can start in those markets,
and over time, we can expand the level
of complexity that we go into.
- There are already self-driving
cars of various levels.
There's automatic braking,
there's adaptive cruise control.
There are even cars that will change lanes
and maneuver in traffic or park for you.
And more and more people
are adapting to car-sharing
and pooling through human
driven services like Lyft.
Society is making little
moves in the right direction.
- The beautiful future that I envision
does depend on automation.
But this future, it's
not all automated cars.
It includes the scooters
and electric bikes
and walking, buses and rail.
It's a vision that moves away
from personal car ownership
to a suite of mobility services.
And the other thing to think about, too,
is that this is going to
be a generational thing.
We're not going to have
self-driving vehicles
everywhere next week.
It will take a generation.
It will take 25 to 30 years to do that.
The ability to have a
fully autonomous vehicle
which is able to drive in every condition,
that's more than 10 years away.
- The car was invented to move us around,
to free us from other limitations.
But in the last 100 years,
it has become its own sort of prison,
keeping us locked up in freeways
and searching for parking spots.
It also puts us in a
tremendous amount of danger.
Autonomous vehicles
offer us the opportunity
to escape that prison.
Will we be smart enough to take it?
(dramatic music)
Thanks for watching this
episode of Uprising.
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as well as tell more stories about people
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