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• GOOGLE TRAFFIC HONOLULU DRIVERS

It rains-more on the windward side of the island than the leeward side-but not substantially more than in Kirkland, Washington, where Google is already testing its vehicles. “When we think about the technology rolling out over time, we imagine we’re going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive, and the technology might come there first,” said Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving cars project, at a conference in March. To be successful, Google has to select locations for test driving very, very carefully. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, there’s a testing site called Mcity that’s used by Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and others, according to The New York Times.Īs the leading and most public-facing company in the driverless car space, Google is under enormous pressure to both get the technology right and to win a massive battle for public opinion. There are at least some companies already testing autonomous driving technology in a region known for its inclement weather-though not necessarily on public roads. “To explore even more challenging environments, we’re beginning to collect data in all sorts of rainy and snowy conditions as we work toward the goal of a self-driving car that will be able to drive come rain, hail, snow or shine!”

GOOGLE TRAFFIC HONOLULU DRIVERS

“For now, if it’s particularly stormy, our cars automatically pull over and wait until conditions improve (and of course, our test drivers are always available to take over),” wrote Google in a December 2015 report, referring to rainy roadways.

But critics who are pushing Google to begin testing in icy conditions sooner rather than later are unlikely to convince the company to do so before it’s ready. If self-driving cars are to transform society the way so many technologists claim they will, they will eventually have to prove they know what to do in a blizzard-even if knowing what to do means refusing to drive through it. There’s not a white line on the road, the weather is shitty, and the traffic is worse.” Let’s stick that thing in Boston for a year. I think we need to start being more targeted and more smart about how we’re doing tests. “I would take 10,000 miles in North Dakota in the wintertime over one million miles in San Francisco. “Driving a million miles in Southern California? Big deal,” said Missy Cummings, the head of robotics at Duke University. Academics who focus on robotics and self-driving cars have been quick to note that even as Google expands testing on public roads to other cities beyond Mountain View, California-including Austin and Kirkland, Washington-it still hasn’t taken to the roads in a region that gets a lot of snow and ice. But critics have pointed out that one fatal accident occurs for approximately every 100 million miles that Americans drive, a figure that makes Google’s test driving record seem puny. Google has logged nearly 1.5 million miles of test driving on public roads in autonomous mode, and in all that time its cars have only caused one minor accident. That is, if they ever gain widespread adoption.

“Driving a million miles in Southern California? Big deal.” All this is why self-driving cars promise to save so many lives. The automobile, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre once said, was “the last refuge of chance and risk in an increasingly controlled and managed society.” And although different cities have their own cultural quirks-in Honolulu, honking your horn is a faux pas unless it’s really an emergency-most bad drivers are bad for the same reasons: People are inconsistent, easily distracted, and generally pretty bad at risk assessment.

And nobody’s using blinkers or paying attention. Wherever you go, it seems, traffic is terrible.