Unpaved

4. Robo-Car

Last February, a bill proposed by state Sen. Greg Brophy allowing self-driving cars in Colorado was indefinitely postponed. For the past few years, the driverless car has been a movement synonymously associated with Google. Senate Bill 16 would’ve made Colorado the fifth state to legalize driverless vehicles. Though they are permissible on roads, “drivers” are still subject laws like prohibiting distractions like cell phones.

I’ve returned to the State Capitol Building to find out why the bill failed. (This time, luckily, Mrs. Otter is nowhere in sight.) The gilded and marble structure of the enormous entry to the House Hearing Rooms looks as though borrowed from an anachronistic Mecca of some fantastical land. Politics have always been a foreign, intangible thing for me—but, like Brophy, I am a tech geek.

“It drives itself in a perfectly straight line,” Brophy says in his office. “Within an inch of accuracy until you need to turn it around.” He’s never been inside Google’s driverless Prius. Instead, he’s talking about auto-steer tractors. As a farmer, Brophy enjoyed the hands-free element of those tractors—his first real exposure to the driverless vehicle concept. “It’s the coolest thing in the world.”

So I ask: Why kill Senate Bill 16? His answer is what plagues droves of geeks: semantics. In Brophy’s bill, vehicles are defined as “self-driving.” In the four other states where bills passed, Google used a different “uniform language.”

“[Google] settled on the use of the word ‘autónomous’ to describe their car,” Brophy says. He clarifies that the Greek word autónomos translates to “self-law.” “I’m not going to use some Orwellian dictionary to redefine words that’ve been used appropriately for millennia!” It was a stipulation Google’s lobbyist wouldn’t bend on.

Still, driverless cars are an inevitable direction transportation progresses toward. Brophy mentions a 2011 research paper from Colombia University that states driverless cars would increase driving efficiency by 43 percent. A sample scenario where you might really see its benefit is on a highway covered in fog. Visibly you can’t make out what’s happening ahead. “But if the cars are talking to each other,” Brophy says, “it’ll begin to slow down before hitting the fog bank.”

As far as what type of car (bi-fuel, NGV) will conquer the market, Brophy’s unsure. He’s for change, but part of him thinks gas and diesel will be here for a while. One Boulder startup figured just as much, and thought to market the ability to “green-tune” your current vehicle.

(Pick up our latest issue of YS for the “Autonomous Driving Timeline”)