SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Silicon Valley tech company recently posted a video front and center on its website that may startle some Sacramentans.
It shows a sleek black car driving across the Tower Bridge … with no one in it.
The company, Phantom Auto, is a key player in the emerging world of autonomous vehicles. But the car cruising across Sacramento’s iconic portal wasn’t a robot car. A human was in fact driving.
That person just happened to be 100-plus miles away, sitting in Phantom Auto’s Mountain View headquarters, with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and a series of computer screens that allowed him to see, via car cameras, 360 degrees around him.
It’s called teleoperations, and some people in the autonomous vehicle industry say it’s the little-known irony behind all the bold talk that computers are about to drive our cars for us and do it more safely.
Phantom Auto executives and many in the industry say that autonomous vehicles are decades away from being able to truly drive safely on city streets and highways all by themselves under any conditions.
Until that time, humans will act as remote monitors and sometime remote operators, watching over the vehicles and grabbing the wheel if the car’s computer gets stumped or the system fails.
“We believe you will always need a human in the loop,” Phantom Auto co-founder and chief strategy officer Elliot Katz said. “There are so many oddball scenarios multiple times a day.”
It could be a tree that’s fallen over the road, requiring the car to go over a double yellow line to get around. The computer may not be programed to do that. Or there could be a police officer in the street ahead at a crash, signaling cars to go around. The computer may just stop the car if it can’t figure out what the officer wants it to do. Heavy rain or snow may confuse the car’s sensors.
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