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(Intersection Magazine, by Euan Sey) We drew them at school, we watched them in cartoons as kids. Along with robots that do the housework and personal jetpacks, the car that drives itself has been a cliché of the future that never was for a generation or more. But 30 years after the first patent was registered, is the driverless car hnally about to make it into functioning reality?

By the end of this year, passengers traveling from the business car park to Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport will be transported not by old-school monorails or moving walkways but by 18 low energy, battery powered, driverless pods. Each will wait patiently for their four passengers, and travel along a dedicated roadway guided by laser sensors, stopping at set points on demand. The Heathrow system will be the world's first comrnercial application of Personal Rapid Transport (PRT). Perhaps more akin to a private train carriage turned taxi, the PRT nonetheless suggests what a driverless future could be like and that it's closer than we think.

lt’s the latest in a long line of experirnents, and only one of many possible applications. First was the vision-guided Mercedes robot van in the '80s. And then the eight year, billion dollar Eureka Prometheus project, funded by the European Comniission, which produced cars that could change lanes and drive in convoy. Eureka culrninated in a heavily modified Mercedes 500 SEL malcing it from Munich to Copenhagen (almost a thousand miles) at speeds of up to 110 mph. Impressive - but although the journey was declared 95% autonomous, there was still a driver who intervened on average every five and a half miles. Eureka ended in 1995 with the prospect of a truly driverless car still some distance on the horizon.

Progress continued in the States. In 1995, a car designed by a team from the Camegie Mellon University upped the ante by claiming 98.2% autonomy on a drive across America - but a driver was still there, this time handling throttles and, fairly crucially, the brakes.

The US rmlitary weighed in: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), spotting the obvious advantage to having self-piloting vehicles in combat, poured in millions of dollars. When that failed, they opened the doors to everyone, announcing an open oornpetition - the Grand Challenge, offering $2 million to anyone who could navigate a robot vehicle around a hundred mile desert course in under 10 hours, 100% unaided.

While these government-sponsored schemes explored the possibility for fully-driverless cars, elements of auto autonomy have been slowly creeping into commercial vehicle design. Radar technology is now sophisticated enough that manufacturers are allowing their cars to help out with distance judging and braking. Other technology to have derived from autonomous car research includes lane departure warning systems, night vision pedestrian detection and adaptive headlights. Indeed, take the intelligent cruise control offered by Mercedes, Jaguar and Honda to its logical conclusion and you'll have the 'trains' of cars promised by the Eureka project.

The extraordinary levels of cooperation needed to make that happen seem likely to emerge with the ubiquity of GPS. But the obstacles are still such that, for now, driverless cars are restricted to closed-off tracks, the domain of PRT.

Instead of taking over the oontrols of private cars, Personal Rapid Transport installs a network of identical `pods' running along dedicated tracks. lt's been dubbed the private train but the inventor of the Heathrow system has his own evocative description. ‘ULTra can be regarded as a horizontal elevator” says Martin Lowson. “ln the same way that the elevator changed the nature of the city in the vertical direclion, l feel that ULTra has the prospect of changing it in the horizontal". Press the button to call for Lowson's 'horizontal elevator' and a pod will arrive to take you to your destination. Computers control the acceleration and braking, while making sure it stays within the boundaries of the concrete track.

Users of long-tem airport car parks will no doubt cheer the first nail in the coffin for the flight-missing connecting bus, but the first significant launch of a PRT system in the 21st Century will also be watched with knotted stomachs by a whole community of enthusiasts, inventors and investors keen to piggyback on Heathrow's success and tell the world how it will revolutionize urban transport.

Doug Malewicki is one such inventor. His SkyTran envisages a future in which commuters can walk to a portal no more than a quarter of a mile from their home, call up a personal transportation pod, on its own magnetically levitated rail network, type in an address and then sit back as it whisks them at speeds of up to 150 mph, nonstop, to their destination. lt then disappears off to a holding station nearby - no parking. no navigating, no driving, no unnecessary stops. no speeding fines or breath tests.  lust 24/7 personal transport on demand Taxi 2.0, if you like.

Malewicki is no part-time dreamer - he 's worked for DARPA and has been pioneering high efficiency, alternative vehicles for decades. And he's not alone in his ideas. As Heathrow launches what is elfectively a mini-pilot of what a town-wide autodrive system could look like, a small town in upstate New York is thinking bigger.

A group of students, architects and activists are planning a 50 year project to tum Ithaca into the first podcar oommunity in America, installing a town-wide system of autonomous cars that will pick up, transport and drop off residents at will. They regard thinking on this scale as a necessity: "It's time we designed cities for the human, not for the automobile," says Jacob Roberts, president of the group, who call thernselves Connect Ithaca. A state-funded study this fall will calculate the viability of their town-wide PRT system.

Global wamting, international oil shortages and safety are all reasons, Connect Ithaca argue, why the time is right for lightweight electric automated vehicles that can ride on their own network separate from normal traflic. Others agree: several cities in Sweden, which has arnbitiously declared it will be fossil fuel free by 2020, are planning systems, and oil-rich Abu Dhabi has started developing a network capable of serving an entire city

The Masdar project a new solar powered 'smart city' in the Emirate designed by UK architects Fosters and Partners, will house 47,500 residents and a further 60,000 workers, without emitting a single gram of carb-on dioxide. The 2.5-square-mile city (around twice the size of Central Park) is built on a grid system inspired by traditional Arabic city planning. Narrow streets cooled by small canals and thick walls will help combat the desert heat. It will use a multitude of transport solutions -light railway. a metro and PRT- the whole city being a fossil fuel-free zone.

Visitors will enter Masdar via a sustainable resource-powered light rail system that connects the primary points, or else park their vehicles at the city wall and use the underground electric PRT system to get around. Six seater, four wheeled pods will run on a network of dedicated roads 20 feet below street level.

"At the moment we are building a miniature city covered with photovoltaic panels to generate the massive amount of solar energy needed to build the main city (some 150 megawatts or so). Once built, this will make the smaller one redundant and the excess green energy can be used to power surrounding developments," explains Gerard Evenden, the Senior Partner in charge of Foster's project. "We can also desalinate water from the airport and Khalifa city and use it to irrigate biofuel crops."

While Masdar will be the first car-free city to use PRT's, it's not as if some of these ideas haven't made it off the drawing board in the past. The first fully working part-time PRT system has been transporting students around West Virginia University's Morgantown campus since 1975, chalking up some 60 million rides in the process. But compared to today’s standards, it's old fashioned, and has more in common with a light railway than a pure autonomous vehicle network. Plus a Campus is not as complex as a town. Approved by the Nixon administration, it should be seen as a cautionary prototype; pioneering but exorbitantly expensive and of limited value.

There is of course a vocal group of naysayers to contend with, counter-arguing with the PRT visionaries. It's not just a question of the lack of technology - aside the cost and complexity, there's the fact that people quite simply like driving. You'd think that someone passionately opposed to US urban sprawl and its attendant voracious appetite for fossil fuel as author James Howard Kunstler is, would be pro PRT, given its reliance on clean electricity. But no, he's against it, in the main because of the sheer scale of the track network. "I've run into the PRT guys at conferences, they seem to be a particular kind of crank" he says in one of his podcasts. "l just don’t get it. It requires so rnuch infrastructure. lf we’re going to and replace the car, why choose something that’s like the car. but not as good as a car?"

"lt is operationally and economically unfeasible,” argues Vukan Vuchio, a professor of transportation and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, bluntly. Professor Vuchic is talking about turning existing cities with deeply embedded transport systems over to PRT. In the developing world, it could be very different.

"Emerging economies such as the UAE and China certainly have more opportunity to go straight for the designed-in approach, purely by the nature of the intensive development activities they are currently undertaking,” reasons ULTra CEO Graham Bradbum. Having said that hes not about to dismiss it as a solution for more developed countries, arguing that it makes good sense in tightly packed urban areas.

“lt is very well suited to more intensive living environments where high-density residential accommodation can be connected with all the services it requires, in a practical and predictable way," he notes. "PRT has the potential to become the standard method of travel for the sort of journeys currently taken by car, taxi and bus."
Doug Malewicki has similar ambitions for SkyTran. The company believe that it could eventually free up the billions of acres of land that are tied up in the world’s road infrastructure: "The thing about the automobile is that it promotes a very spread-out living model," SkyTran's Chris Perkins points out. 'Think of all the thousands of miles of pipes, sewers and wires that have to go into the ground or be erected on poles. And all the low-density developments that have been built around those roads to service the needs of the thousands of people that use them.

This road-replacement rhetoric is animated on the SkyTran website to show the grassing over of neglected asphalt under a sucoessful PRT branch line, but if that starts to seem a touch fanciful, then other PRT advocates offer a solution that fits more neatly into western car culture. Called ‘dual-mode', this system brings the car back into the fold to exploit its undeniable usefulness at delivering us right to our door.

Heathrow’s PRT inventor Martin Lowson explains how it works: "People can have their own car in the garage. drive it to a guideway portal and then sit back while the automatic system takes over. At their destination, they either leave and resume driving, or get off at a station and leave their car to be parked automatically."
Such is Lowson's confidence in dual mode, he's allowed the rubber-tyred pods at Heathrow to contemplate a future untrammelled by their guide-roads. "Several key design features of the ULTra vehicle were deliberately chosen so that a future dual-mode version of the system would be possible,” he says "Future PRT with a full dual-mode capability and high-speed inter-urban links in my view could be implemented within 20 years."

SkyTran‘s Perkins is also supremely optimistic and has a ready answer to anyone who thinks differently; "Back in the '80s, when the lntemet was in its infancy, nobody suspected that within two decades it would have over two billion users and be a must-have for any civilized person," he says. "Our PRT system has the potential to be just as much of a game changer."

The problem is perhaps one of marketing and design. Alongside TV's 'Knight Rider', films like ‘Minority Report', ‘Demolition Man' and 'Total Recall' have whetted the public's appetite for driverless cars, but if science fiction is to become fact, consumers will have to accept the proposition benefits them, and be prepared to pay for it.

The year is 2040, and you’ve got to get to dinner quickly. You climb into an elegant glass-lined shell - a mobile pied-a-terre, appointed with seating for seven, a flatscreen and a bar. You ask the onboard computer for the nearest Thai restaurant with a four-star rating and lamb massaman on the menu. The display serves up its recommendation, and you select your destination, relax, enjoy a glass of something you couldn't drink behind the wheel and allow the electric vehicles GPS and navigational sensors take you there. Using the vehicle’s links to your social networks, you pick up a few friends on the way

Welcome to the smoothly speculative world of the Autonomobile, or ATNMBL, a concept vehicle from industrial designers Maailte Evers and Mike Simonian. The 38-year-old couple and creative partners began working on the vehicle last year as a challenging side study the type they like to tackle alongside their commissioned projects.

Combining their different backgrounds to award-winning effect - they designed Googles G1 phone - Evers grew up in the Netherlands and has designs for Hewlett-Packard and Adidas on her resume. while LA-born Simonian took the lead in designing the Xbox 360 and started his own skateboard company, Flowlab, based around the 14-wheel board he designed. All these tangy endeavors have benefited from the friendly; low-key duo’s outsider perspective.

The Mike and Maaike studio is ensconced, unobtrusively in a storefront in the well-heeled, windy Marina District of San Francisco. Outside, the dramatic ooast-side Highway 1, documented in so many car commercials, spills autos from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the streets of the city.

“People have said we have a fairly strong narrative in the work we do," Evers says, soft-spoken and thoughtful to the boyish Sirnonian, who, in his striped shirt and with his curly close crop, looks like he's never stopped skating. "We're interested in prohlerns." she adds with a chuckle. "Thats why we don 't shy away from very diverse subject matters. We do fumiture. we do computers, we do automotive." ATNMBL grew out of the pair's critical view of their new Prius. After cherishing their 1963 Beetle and Thunderbird. as well as vintage Vespa scooters. they decided to get the Toyota hybrid because it had the rnost technologically advanced drive train on the market. "But after going from 1963 technology to 200? technology, we thought; ‘This is the sarne experience; nothing has really changed."

So the two decided to "take a step hack from where the car industry is telling us things are going,” Sirnonian oontinues. The two puzzled over the fact that the auto industry’s idea of luxury and performance still hasn't changed in more than 40 years: the focus continues to he placed on electrical gadgets and a powerful, hidden engine. Their solution is an architecturally inspired. driverless vehicle that blends public and private transportation without demanding changes to the current infrastructure. The car drives and parks itself and when not in your use can be part of a larger car share fleet.

“For the purposes of this project we dropped any concepts that were halfway," he explains. “Anything that still needed a steering wheel, which is probably going to be the case for rnany years, even a driverless car needs a steering wheel sometirnes - we dropped.That's when the design came to be completely changed, because you don't need to worry about visibility or the seating posture of the driver"

Instead of making the wheels "way too big because it looks cool," he adds, "what if we do the opposite? Lets make them srnaller in order to arrive at something new. lf you look at cars functionally, wheels don't need to be part of their style. They can be like the engine, something you don't see. So that’s the approach we took: Lets make this car not about wheels and drive train. Let’s make it about the interior space."

"It wasn't necessarily‘ to make it a party-mobile,” Evers says referring to the bar. “But thinking about limos - they have spaoe. refreshments, conversational layout - that‘s an evolution of living. It's human, not like moving cattle."

The focus on the human experience has led to talks with several car companies, none of which happen to be a part of the beleaguered US auto industry. The two hope to make a prototype, although the ATNMBL could remain purely speculative. “People who love cars don't necessarily love a car like this," Simonian confesses. "But then there’s this whole other group of people who are asking us, 'why isn't this out now? Get it done! How soon can this happen?'" As for the technology that would make the ATNMBL possible, they believe a partly driven, partly driverless car is possible in the next 10 years. "I think those things are really not that far off," says Evers. “Luxury cars right now have technology in them that can sense distance and have cruise control that will decelerare and accelerate, depending on the traffic in front of you."

Yet there are those who will find any reason to resist change. "There was a talk we did, and this lady was very funny," Evers recalls. “She said, ‘this would never work in Pennsylvania - have you seen how ugly the people and how ugly the roads are there? Nobody wants to look out their window!'"

Text: Euan Sey
Illustration: Michelberger Hotel
Additional Reporting: Nick Gibbs
ATNMBL:
Text: Kimberly Chun
Photography: Winni Wintermeyer

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