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l TUESDAY l APRIL 23 l 2013

IN THE EXPRESS

13

THE FUTURE OF THE CAR

Clean, safe and it drives itself

Cars have already changed the way we live. They are likely to do so again

OME inventions, like some species, seem to make periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed between Karl Benz beginning small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape. By putting production of the Model T on moving assembly lines set into the floor of his factory in Detroit, Ford drastically cut the time needed to build it, and hence its cost. Thus began a revolution in personal mobility. Almost a billion cars now roll along the worlds highways. Today the car seems poised for another burst of evolution. One way in which it is changing relates to its emissions. As emerging markets grow richer, legions of new consumers are clamouring for their first set of wheels. For the whole world to catch up with American levels of car ownership, the global fleet would have to quadruple. Even a fraction of that growth would present fearsome challenges, from congestion and the price of fuel to pollution and global warming. Yet stricter regulations and smarter technology are making cars cleaner, more fuel-efficient and safer than ever before. China, its cities choked in smog, is following Europe in imposing curbs on emissions of noxious nitrogen oxides and fine soot particles. Regulators in most big car markets are demanding deep cuts in the carbon dioxide emitted from car exhausts. And carmakers are being remarkably inventive in finding ways to comply. Granted, battery-powered cars have disappointed. They remain expensive, lack range and are sometimes dirtier than they look for example, if they run on electricity from coal-fired power stations. But car companies are investing heavily in other clean technologies. Future motorists will have a widening choice of super-efficient petrol and diesel cars, hybrids (which

switch between batteries and an internal-combustion engine) and models that run on natural gas or hydrogen. As for the purely electric car, its time will doubtless come.

TOWARDS THE DRIVERLESS, NEAR-CRASHLESS CAR

MEANWHILE, a variety of driver assistance technologies are appearing on new cars, which will not only take a lot of the stress out of driving in traffic but also prevent many accidents. More and more new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Some carmakers are promising technology that detects pedestrians and cyclists, again overruling the driver and stopping the vehicle before it hits them. A number of firms, including Google, are busy trying to take driver assistance to its logical conclusion by creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination without a human at the controls. This is where it gets exciting. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff (and a recent visitor from The Economist) along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages. As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting. If and when cars go completely driverless for those who want this the benefits will be enormous. Google gave

California Governor Edmund G Brown Jr, state Senator Alex Padilla and Google co-founder Sergey Brin stand by Googles driverless car. a taste by putting a blind man in a prototype and filming him being driven off to buy takeaway tacos. Huge numbers of elderly and disabled people could regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. The colossal toll of deaths and injuries from road accidents 1.2m killed a year worldwide, and 2m hospital visits a year in America alone should tumble down, along with the costs to health systems and insurers. Driverless cars should also ease congestion and save fuel. Computers brake faster than humans. And they can sense when cars ahead of them are braking. So driverless cars will be able to drive much closer to each other than humans safely can. On motorways they could form fuel-efficient road trains, gliding along in the slipstream of the vehicle in front. People who commute by car will gain hours each day to work, rest or read a newspaper. self-driving technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits, and be put off continuing to develop it. Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually. The cars software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into the road, because a child may be chasing it. Googles self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive;

AP

ROADBLOCKS AHEAD

SOME carmakers think this vision of the future is (as Henry Ford once said of history) bunk. People will be too terrified to hurtle down the motorway in a vehicle they do not control: computers crash, dont they? Carmakers whose

and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology. If the notion that the driverless car is round the corner sounds far-fetched, remember that TV and heavier-thanair flying machines once did, too. One day people may wonder why earlier generations ever entrusted machines as dangerous as cars to operators as fallible as humans.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013

MOBILE APPS

Paris, cest fini

THE French have always loved Apple. Its elegant products and nimble operating systems, and its underdog struggles against IBM and Microsoft in the 1980s, are especially appealing in a country that prides itself on being chic, clever and revolutionary. Apples two stores in central Paris nestle in locations that are dear to French hearts under the Louvre and directly opposite the Opra. But the love affair is fading in official circles at any rate as concern grows that the technology giants market grip threatens to suffocate a business in which French entrepreneurs have been successful: designing applications for mobile devices. The government has made a fuss over Apples eviction from its app store of a popular product developed by a French start-up firm. AppGratis offers its users one free app a day, charging developers for making their products known to a wider audience. Simon Dawlat, the boss of AppGratis and creator of its eponymous product, thinks the app performs a valuable service in providing a continuous stream of editorial picks of the highest quality from the complex world of apps. Around 12m people have downloaded AppGratis, he says, and perhaps a quarter of them at least consider the chosen app each day. First marketed outside France in 2012, AppGratis has at times been the most popular free entertainment download for devices running Apples iOS operating system in 78 countries including the United States, according to App Annie, a marketresearch firm. In early 2013 AppGratis had raised more than Euro 10m ($13m) for an expansion that has now been put on hold.

A spat between Apple and a popular French start-up causes a furore

Obama frowns after Senate failed to pass a gun-control bill proposing more background checks.

AP

GUN CONTROL

Taken down
A modest attempt to curb the sale of firearms fails
EVERY so often there appears to be a turning point in the debate over guns in America. The latest came in December, when 20 children and six staff were shot to death at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. We cant tolerate this any more, said Barack Obama shortly afterwards. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. Americans seemed to agree. Polls showed increased support for stricter gunlawsintheaftermathoftheshooting. But as the months passed, that enthusiasm waned. Sensing this, in March Democrats in theSenateintroducedonlyamodestbill that contained few of the big restrictions first sought by gun-control advocates and by the administration. It aimed to toughen penalties for illegal gun sales and increase funding for school-safety programmes. Most important, it would have expanded the use of background checks, which are meant to keep unfit people,likecriminalsandthementallyill, fromacquiringguns.Undercurrentlaw, such checks are required only for sales handled by a licensed dealer. The bill wouldhaveextendedtherequirementto all purchases. Although immensely popular, this was poison to many Republican legislators, who do not like the idea of government interference in private sales. So a compromise was hashed out between two pro-gun senatorsJoe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Patrick Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvaniathat focused only on extending the checks to sales at gun shows and online. In the end, even that proved too ambitious. Despite having once supported more background checks, the National Rifle Association threatened senators with electoral retribution if they backed Obamas gun ban. Some appeared cowed. Early signs of support quickly faded, and on April 17th the Democrats failed to muster the 60 votes needed to pass the background-check compromise, derailing their push for stricter gun laws. Short memories cannot be blamed

for the defeat. Democrats incessantly invoked the victims of Newtown and other gun violence during the debate. But far from swaying the 41 Republicans and four Democrats who blocked the measure, the tactic dismayed some. When the family members of victims showed up in Washington, Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, called them the presidents props. Mr Paul and others noted that the background-check proposal would not have stopped Adam Lanza, the shooter in Newtown, who had used his mothers legally-obtained guns to carry out his massacre. This is true, but proposals that would have taken some of the firepower out of Lanzas hands won even less support. Bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines did not even win a majority of votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The measure that came closest to passing this week would have made it easier to carry a concealed weapon. All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington, said Mr Obama. He and his fellow Democrats vowed to continue to pursue tougher gun laws, but their way forward is now unclear. If a tragedy like Newtown cannot galvanise support for even modest reforms, nothing will.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013

Frances digital-economy minister Fleur Pellerin with AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat. Pellerin castigated Apple for its brutal REUTERS treatment of the French start-up.

Apple says AppGratis flouted its bans on promoting other publishers products and on using push notifications for paid marketing. Apple dislikes apps that serve as shopfronts for other ones. It worries that app-discovery products can help developers with deep pockets move their apps up the league tables and distort the market. So it is rather puzzling that a version of AppGratis for iPads was approved less than a week before the mobilephone version was evicted from the app store, and that other app-discovery applications are still available there. Perhaps AppGratis was growing too popular too quickly and that was its real fault. Fleur Pellerin, Frances digitaleconomy minister, castigated Apple on April 11th for its brutal

treatment of AppGratis and spoke of tightening the regulation of giant internet firms, in France and at European Union level. The countrys competition authority is looking into the relationship between app stores Googles no less than Apples and developers. The French have a lengthening list of grievances against the internet giants, including their failure to pay serious taxes, the refusal of Microsofts Skype to register as a telecoms operator and Twitters reluctance to name those behind an outburst of racist tweets. Ms Pellerin may not manage to whittle them down to size; others have tried and failed. But for Apple and France, at least, it is looking increasingly like the end of the affair.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013