Darren owns a Tesla, but what attracted him to the popular car brand wasn’t what lures most of its fans.
Darren has quadriplegia, which he says means he is paralysed from the shoulders down.
It means others help him get around his hometown of Gladstone in Queensland by driving him in his own car.
But more and more, he says, they aren’t really driving either.
“At first it was a bit of a gimmick, jumping into autopilot. You press the stalk down twice and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I don’t like this’ and they’ll be a little bit scared,” Darren told triple j Hack.
“But after maybe the fourth or fifth drive, they’ll start to get used to it.”
Tesla’s ‘autopilot’ feature is as close as Aussies can get to a self-driving car right now.
The technology uses cameras to see where the car is on the road, what other drivers are doing, and what all the road signs and signals say.
“We travel to Rocky or Brisbane quite a lot, and it’s great along those roads,” Darren says.
“But they do have to be paying attention because the camera watches you and it’ll disengage if you take your eyes off the thing too long.”
Autopilot is not a full self-driving technology. Rather, it requires a driver to be constantly ready to take over, and will shut itself off if it detects their attention slipping.
Darren says he’s closely following news from the United States of much more advanced self-driving systems that can drive completely independently.
He hopes they might one day give him and other Australians with disability full access to the road on their own terms.
At present, he says he’s often left waiting “hours and hours and hours” when wheelchair-accessible taxis aren’t available.
“In the Gold Coast it’s impossible to get wheelchair taxis, especially if there’s any events on,” he says.
“Often, taxi drivers will see that you’re in a wheelchair and scoot around because they will get more money from a whole packed taxi.
“If there was a robotaxi that would just rock up and I drive my wheelchair into it, that would be completely game changing.”
‘Unpredictable’ kangaroos a roadblock
Darren has reason to be hopeful.
Research shows self-driving car technology is constantly improving in safety and efficiency.
In fact, a paper published today in Nature Communications found that, based on Californian accident data, self-driving cars are already much safer than human drivers in most conditions.
However, the researchers from the University of Central Florida also found that around corners, self-driving cars were nearly twice as likely to get into an accident as human drivers, and at dawn and dusk their risk was five times greater.
Experts here say this doesn’t bode well for the adoption of self-driving on Australian roads any time soon, where evening and early morning driving is already complicated by our relatively more accident-prone marsupials.
Amit Trivedi is the acting director of the Queensland Department of Transport’s Cooperative and Automated Vehicle Initiative, which has been studying the unique challenges self-driving cars face on Australian roads for years.
“There are three unique Australian conditions that automated vehicles have to negotiate their way around,” he told Hack.
“The first one is unique Australian wildlife – everyone knows kangaroos are quite unpredictable.
“The second one we found was long trucks: the road trains we have are very unique in the world.
“And also some of the rural roads that we have are very narrow – just a single lane, and they’re bi-directional.”
Amit says it’s not detecting kangaroos that complicates self-driving cars in Australia, it’s “predicting how they’re going to act next”.
“When we did a study, we found that with less effort, we were able to detect kangaroos, but we did not have enough data to come to conclusions on how algorithms can predict their behaviour.
“So basically, no, we’ve got to get some more data – it’s still a work in progress.”
Accidents the price of data
During the past seven years, Amit and his team at the Queensland Department of Transport, in collaboration with the Queensland University of Technology, have studied self-driving cars in Mount Isa, Bundaberg, and in urban environments like Ipswich and Brisbane.
But even all that data pales in comparison to what’s being collected in the United States, where thousands of fully self-driving vehicles are being tested on public roads in California and Arizona.
Just last week, US self-driving company Waymo recalled more than 600 of its self-driving cars after one of them struck a telephone pole in Phoenix.
Last September, a taxi made by another self-driving manufacturer, Cruise, hit a woman in San Francisco and dragged her six metres along the road before stopping, hospitalising her and triggering a recall of all 950 of its cars in the city.
Amit says similar trials have yet to be conducted in Australia, where regulations in every state require an attentive driver at the wheel.
However, he says the country’s first test of self-driving cars without a human driver may begin soon.
“We are working on creating a remote operation centre in Brisbane, and once that is ready, we will be trying out driving our prototype [car] without a driver in the driver’s seat,” he says.
He also says the National Transport Commission is working on a national framework to regulate self-driving vehicle testing on public roads.
“I think we’re targeting some time about 2026, 2027 to have a national automatic vehicle law ready so that these tech companies can come with confidence to Australia.”
Self-driving on the horizon?
Amit estimates that cars capable of autonomous highway driving will arrive in Australia within the next decade.
However, he reckons the focus on American roads for research is likely to slow the rollout of fully self-driving robotaxis – the kind Darren will need to travel without a driver.
“At the moment, we do not know when that could occur in Australia, the reason being the technology companies are pretty much focusing at the moment on the US market,” he says.
Professor Michael Milford directs Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Robotics, which frequently studies self-driving, and he agrees the technology is still a long way away in Australia.
However, he says that if self-driving reaches the stage where “it just works”, that will cease to matter.
“It will be a technology that just makes its way to our shores like smartphones have,” he says.
“The fact that we drive on the left, the fact that we have some unique signage – all of those are solvable problems if the commercial players care enough to come to Australia and see enough commercial interest.”
He also says attitudes toward the technology are shifting rapidly within government as the applications for Australians with mobility issues like Darren become apparent.
“Five or 10 years ago I’d be on a panel with a bureaucrat or politician and I’d be cringing at every second thing that they said about autonomous vehicles,” Professor Milford jokes.
“Nowadays, it’s much more common that I can just sit back and listen to what they say, because they’re making a lot more sense – I think there’s been a really big improvement across the board in that area.”