The Risk Factor

USA Today ran a small story last week on Nissan Motors plans to equip all of its cars and trucks with a dashboard gauge showing the fuel-efficiency of one's driving. The gauge displays your instantaneously computed miles per gallon as a bar graph - the more fuel efficient you drive, the longer the bar displayed.

Nissan claims that based on its in-house testing drivers will cut their fuel by 10%.

I bet if the price per gallon of gasoline was also displayed, or maybe the IRS standard cost per mile reimbursement rate (currently 48.5 cents per mile) used instead, people would drive even less. Seeing that the drive to the local store ten miles away cost you $9.70 might give you incentive to do it less.

Maybe Nissan will add in a costing feature as well in the future. The average cost per gallon gasoline or a total cost of driving per mile could be broadcast over a preset radio frequency, which then could be used to compute the cost per trip.

Given that Nissan's gauge looks software driven, this shouldn't be too difficult too add.

According to today's Boston Globe (registration may be required), the Massachusetts Appeals Court upheld the accuracy of information received from automobile event data recorders (EDR) for use in court cases. Event data recorders, sometimes called car "black boxes," are devices installed in a motor vehicle to record technical vehicle and occupant information for a brief period of time (seconds, not minutes) before, during and after a crash, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Association website.

An EDR may record (1) pre-crash vehicle dynamics and system status (e.g., wheel speed, engine rpm), (2) driver inputs (e.g., braking, acceleration), (3) vehicle crash signature, (4) restraint usage/deployment status, and (5) post-crash data such as the activation of an automatic collision notification (ACN) system. According to an article in Time magazine, some 64% of cars made today have EDRs, and about 33% of all cars on the road today have them installed.

In the Massachusetts case, a woman was sentenced to two years in prison after her GMC Yukon skidded on ice and hit a tree, killing her passenger in 2003. The woman claimed that she was traveling only 20 to 30 miles per hour when she lost control, but the car's recorder showed that she was traveling 58 m.p.h. in a 40 m.p.h. zone. Her lawyer appealed her case arguing that the EDR's information was not reliable or accurate.

Consumer and privacy advocates have been opposite sides of the debate. According to the Time article, Public Citizen's Joan Claybrook "wants tougher rules compelling automakers to install EDRs in every car because objective crash data will lead to the design of safer cars and highways. Privacy activists want the government to prevent police and insurance companies from checking drivers' black boxes without permission. 'We have a surveillance monster growing in our midst," says Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union. 'These black boxes are going to get more sophisticated and take on new capabilities.' "

Like most technologies, once out of the bottle, they can't be put back in. And when its a question of public safety or privacy, privacy usually loses. The same will likely be true in the case of electronic medical records.

The New York Times this week had an article on smart cars and how one will "soon" be in a showroom near you. It quotes Dr. Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist who heads up Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, as saying, "Within five years, it’s totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work reliably in several limited domains."

Furthermore, the article says, "In 20 years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges that’s just an educated guess. While he doesn’t doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, he’s not sure how many humans will let them."

It will be interesting to see what happens when the first smart car crashes into one driven by a plain old human driver and results in a severe injury or death. Will the smart car's software be blamed? Will the argument be that the human driver has to be at fault since the smart car is assumed to be more carefully driven? And will the case be argued by "smart lawyers," a term that seems somehow oxymoronic to me?

When the new $8 billion Terminal 5 opens in March of next year at London's Heathrow airport, you won't have to worry about remembering where you park your car. According to a story in USA Today, infrared cameras and sensors will be capturing a car's license plate as it enters the terminal's parking garage, and as the car makes its way inside the garage, additional cameras will be monitoring it. Cameras will also take a picture of where each car eventually ends up parking.

When passengers return from a flight, they can go to a kiosk and either enter their parking ticket or license plate number. The location of their car will then be displayed on a diagram of the parking terminal.

The parking garage will also have information telling passengers where there is open parking. You can read a story about smart parking technology in a story I wrote for IEEE Spectrum on-line here.

In a related parking story, also from USA Today, it seems that because parking is at such a premium in many areas of Britain, that fast-food restaurants like McDonald's are warning customers to eat up in 45 minutes or risk a parking fine of $150, while supermarkets and department stores, including British retail giant Tesco, are warning shoppers they too will be fined if they park for more than two or three hours. Just like at Heathrow, cameras are being used to identify the cars overstaying the parking time limits.

This week the Chicago Daily Herald ran a three-part series called "Toll Gridlock" that reported on the problems with the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority's collection system. The series found that the toll authority is often "sending violation notices to the wrong addresses, leaving some drivers to miss out on chances to pay up before fines skyrocket or their driver's licenses are suspended."

In one case, a driver didn't know her I-PASS (electronic toll payment transponder) ran out of money and accumulated $179.50 in owed tolls. She was sent a letter saying she now owes $4,619, and had better pay up in two weeks, or owe the tollway $15,739 and eventually lose her driver's license.

The series also notes that "tollway officials say their license plate image readers have trouble discerning differences among the myriad of plate varieties, affecting about 25 percent of all plates on the road. This may result in fines being leveled against law-abiding motorists."

In addition, the series states that the toll authority doesn't know how many are cheating or how many motorists are being fined unfairly.

Finally, the series notes that the toll authority's management thinks all of the problems are minor, and that the way fines are assessed is "fair."

Glad I don't drive in Illinois.

When I used to live in the UK, having an A - Z guide was mandatory for getting around. The UK is one of those countries that seems to have an attitude that if you are lost, you deserve to be. My memory is that I could always find a sign telling you were leaving a county, town or village, but not that you were ever entering one.

The UK attitude towards (not) providing clear directions on road signs seems to have extended to some of its former colonies like Virginia where I now live, where having an ADC map is absolutely vital if you want to get around without wandering in circles.

Anyway, IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Joshua Romero pointed me to a story in the London Telegraph about the proliferation of GPS navigation in the UK, and the problems they are creating in the UK. It seems that Network Rail claims that 2,000 railroad crossing and bridges are hit annually - some 6 or 7 a day - by trucks that have been directed along inappropriate roads for their size. Network Rail said that it was now mapping the UK’s low bridges and level crossings so that information could be fed into GPS navigation software.

Part of the reason is that many of the trucks are being driven by non-English speaking drivers, who rely almost exclusively on the navigation system for guidance. Network Rails says that, "We are now trialling smart signs complete with laser detectors which will tell oncoming vehicles that they won't clear the bridge ahead."

It is not only Network Rail that is having problems. Small towns and villages are finding that trucks and coaches driving down roads and country lanes are also smacking into buildings and cottages, or getting stuck and blocking local traffic. Some village councils are now posting anti-satellite navigation system signs up.

Back in 2006, the UK Department for Transport supposedly was going to develop a "star rating system" that would tell consumers how reliable GPS navigation systems were, but I am not sure of its status. Still too soon to throw out those A -Z guides just yet, I reckon.

It is being reported that Chysler is expanding the recall of its Jeep Commander SUVs to repair engine stalling caused by a flaw in the automatic transmission software that could, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) "could cause a crash without warning."

In March, Chrysler recalled 1,338 of the 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Commander SUVs to repair a stalling problem in the vehicles. The NHTSA reported at the time that the “the front control module may have been incorrectly manufactured. This could cause the engine to stall while driving or nor to start.”

This month, Chrysler expanded the recall to include 24,461 Jeep Commanders equipped with the 4.7 liter engine and built before 11 January 2006.

As a point of reference, GM expects its cars to have about 100 million lines of software in them by around 2010. Software reliability issues will undoubtedly increase in cars from sheer numbers if nothing else.

Having bought a new car in the past month, I sometimes feel that it is more computer network on wheels than anything else. I am still climbing the learning curve on how to operate all the gadgets in the car.

Car manufacturers, unfortunately, seem to have taken on the same attitude of many manufacturers in the computer and electronics space - make the operating instructions to their tech toys as confusing and contradictory as possible. Car manufacturers may claim in their automobile commercials that they are spending a lot on the human factors engineering side, but from a software systems perspective, I don't see much value being created for all the money being spent.

A few months back, I wrote about how the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority was sending violation notices to the wrong addresses, leaving some drivers to miss out on the opportunity to pay their fines before the fines dramatically increased or their driver's licenses were suspended.

Now the Toll Authority's new computer system used to check vehicles traveling on the Illinois tollway using the I-PASS (electronic toll payment transponder) was found to have a software problem that affected Wisconsin drivers.

According to an AP story, Wisconsin I-Pass users whose transponders didn't register when going through a toll (as sometimes happens) didn't match up properly during a tollway enforcement system validation cross-check between Illinois and Wisconsin I-Pass records. As a result, the Wisconsin drivers got a fine for using an "expired" I-Pass transponder or for not owning one at all.

The root cause of the problem was, according to the story, that "the new Illinois computer system allowed Wisconsin drivers signing up for the I-PASS to identify their vehicle as a 'passenger' car. But Wisconsin records listed the license plates as an 'auto.' " The incompatibility was why the databases didn't sync up when checked and Wisconsin drivers got whacked even though they had working I-Pass transponders.

Why the incompatibility existed in the first place wasn't explained.

No one seems to know how many Wisconsin drivers have been affected, either, and it will take at least another six months before the situation can be cleared up.