This is a statistic that is as staggering as it is difficult to grasp. Every 16 hours, someone in the world dies because a driver is in such a hurry to get to their destination that they see red. Road rage obviously amplified by inadequate transportation systems and a completely absurd car culture.
It is very absurd, yes, this automobile industry, where nothing is more important than raw power. Indeed, we can clearly see that there is not only brute power on board vehicles where drivers feel enough mustard rising in their noses to cause a little more than one fatal accident per day.
Six-speed nonsense
Two weeks ago an international exhibition was held in Tokyo focused on sustainable mobility, a new way of calling auto shows now that auto shows are almost dead. Taking advantage of this international showcase in Tokyo, representatives of major international manufacturers sent the following message: the electrification targets are too high! They should be reduced! Push them back! Abolish them!
Consumers, they say, don’t want electric vehicles. Look how demand is losing steam and sales are slowing down! In any case, that’s what the bosses of the big manufacturers say, even if they are wrong. In recent months they have put on the market vehicles with engines producing 500 horsepower or more and whose retail price is over $100,000, and they are surprised these days that buyers are showing up at their dealerships in fewer many more than they expected.
In the process, these same major manufacturers unveiled concept vehicles – sketches which are given real physical form during a few automobile exhibitions – foreshadowing new models to come.
Among these concepts: a 1,300 horsepower electric supercar from Nissan. Because without power, the electric shift is nothing, we know that well. And Nissan, whose senior management has been mired in internal scandals that have caused it to fall hugely behind schedule in its electrification plans, believes that resuscitating the flame that burns in the hearts of fans of its GT-R sports car is the best way to say: “Here we go again!” “.
Wait, there’s better.
Toyota also had concept vehicles to unveil in Tokyo. We can’t blame them much, given that we only saw their bodywork. But in the process, its managers indicated that they had developed a new manual transmission which could be sold as an option on its future electric vehicles. Honda also recently patented a similar manual gear shifting system applicable to an electric motor.
The problem being that electric motors are generally installed directly on the axle of the vehicles they power. A gearbox is of no use to them. We wouldn’t even know what to plug it into!
In addition, manual transmission models have only represented 3% of all gasoline vehicles sold in North America for several years.
But a six-speed manual sports car sends an image. It’s a signal. This means that we take driving to heart: we don’t drive, we pilot.
Tell me about that, a 1,300 horsepower electric car with a six-speed manual gearbox!
AI to the rescue
It didn’t take long, five years ago, when we started talking about self-driving cars for us to quickly ask highly philosophical questions like: “Yes, but should self-driving cars make the choice moral between hitting a mother and her baby or hitting a wall and risk killing its four occupants? »
Legitimate question. Which obscures much more mundane questions such as: should manufacturers be required to install a driver monitoring system on board their vehicles which would prevent them from losing their minds?
This is the kind of surveillance that an artificial intelligence (AI) can do, without having to challenge René Descartes or pass a Turing test. And, already, the hardware exists. Several manufacturers have already installed cameras that analyze the driver’s behavior to alert them if they are distracted or pretend to fall asleep.
The organization that published the information on road rage deaths, called Geonode, believes that the next generation of these technologies will include the recognition of negative emotions, precisely to prevent cases of road rage. When things are presented like this, we can’t wait for AI to make its debut in automobiles, since it could be more intelligent than humans in situations where emotions take over reason.
And that too is still quite absurd. We will have to ask an AI to manage emotions, on board vehicles that are too expensive, too big and too powerful, of people unable to contain themselves when approaching a red light that is too red, a slow vehicle that is too slow, or a cyclist too… too much, exactly?
Come to think of it, the car may not be the right place for AI. The direction of the major manufacturers seems more appropriate…