[转帖] [2013.04.19] Clean, safe and it drives itself 清洁，安全并且自动驾驶

showcraft

http://www.ecocn.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=185699
The future of the car
汽车之未来

Clean, safe and it drives itself
清洁，安全并且自动驾驶

Cars have already changed the way we live. They are likely to do so again
汽车已经改变了我们的生活方式，很可能再改变一次

Apr 20th 2013 |From the print edition



SOME 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 world’s highways.

有些发明，就像有些物种一样，似乎周期性地会发生飞跃。汽车就是其中之一。从卡尔•本茨开始小规模制造他发明的“机械车”起，25年之后，亨利•福特和他的工程师们在1913年实现了突破，将汽车变成了一种无所不在，销量巨大，并且界定了现代城市景观的商品。在底特律的福特工厂，通过将T型汽车在流水线上进行生产，汽车组装时间大幅减少，成本随之降低，个人移动能力的革命也从此开始。如今，全世界的公路上奔驰着约10亿辆汽车。

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.

今天，汽车似乎已经在为下一波进化的到来做准备。改变之一与汽车排放有关。随着新兴市场越来越富有，新的消费大军嚷嚷着要买他们的第一辆车。在汽车保有量上如果全球都达到美国的水平，总量上还要翻两番。哪怕是这一增加的零头，都意味着可怕的挑战，从拥堵和油价，到污染和全球变暖。

Yet, as our special report this week argues, 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.

然而正如本周特别报道所述，更加严格的法规和更智能的技术，使得汽车前所未有地更加清洁、省油和安全。饱受烟雾困扰的中国，正效仿欧洲对有害的氮氧化物与微小颗粒排放进行控制。在主要的汽车销售大国里，立法者要求大幅削减汽车尾气中的二氧化碳，而汽车制造商们在设法满足法规要求方面，也相当具有创造性。

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.

的确，电池驱动汽车令人不甚满意，昂贵，续航短，有时还比看起来要脏――比如说它运行所用的电力来自于燃煤电厂的话。但汽车厂商正投入巨资用于开发其它清洁技术。未来轮上一族有更大的选择余地：超能效汽油与柴油车，混动车（可在电池和内燃机之间切换），还有使用天然气或氢气的车型。至于纯电动汽车，它的时代无疑终将到来。

Towards the driverless, near-crashless car
目标无人驾驶，不会撞车

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.

与此同时，在新车上正涌现出各种“辅助驾驶”技术，它们既可减轻堵车时的许多压力，也可以避免许多事故。越来越多的新车可以自动泊车，读取路牌，在稳定的车流中保持安全距离，还可以自动刹车以避免事故。有些车商承诺开发一项技术可以探测行人与骑车人，在碰撞发生前否定驾车人的意图并将车停住。包括Google在内的许多公司，正努力使辅助驾驶顺理成章地转变为无人驾驶，让车辆自动行驶到指定地点而无需人工控制。这很令人激动。

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.

Google的联合创始人谢尔盖•布林预言五年内消费者将可以购买无人驾驶汽车。这也许乐观了一点，但Google已经用于在加州高速公路上接送员工（最近还有一位来自《经济学人》的客人）的原型车让人印象深刻。Google想为世界直接提供一辆无人驾驶汽车，但更可能是逐步发展，慢慢为驾车人所接受。

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.

传感器和辅助驾驶软件已经证明它们有助于减少事故，立法者也会让所有新车强制安装这些设备。保险商已经在施压让驾车人接受黑匣子－－可以测量驾驶的谨慎程度：这将提供大量数据用于证明汽车自动巡航常常比有人驾驶更安全。电脑绝不会酒后驾驶，或是一边开车一边发短信。

If and when cars go completely driverless—for those who want this—the benefits will be enormous. Google gave 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.

如果汽车最终无人驾驶――对于乐见其成的人来说――好处将是巨大的。Google尝试过让盲人乘坐它的原型车，并拍摄他如何把车“开走”去买外带玉米饼的。无数的老年人和残疾人士可以从此重新获得个人移动能力。年轻人也不用再买要命的车险，因为他们冒失的手脚不会再碰方向盘或是油门。道路事故伤亡的巨大数字――全球每年死亡120万，单是美国每年就有200万就医――将不复存在，还有医疗和保险的支出。

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.

无人驾驶也将缓解拥堵和节省燃油。电脑刹车比人更快，还能感知前方的车正在刹车。因此无人驾驶汽车在保证安全的前提下可以比有人驾驶的车开得更近。在高速上，它们可以组成省油的“公路火车”，沿着前方车辆的气流滑行。开车上下班的人们将每天节省数小时来工作，休息或看报。

Roadblocks ahead
前方的困难

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, don’t they? Carmakers whose self-driving technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits, and be put off continuing to develop it.

有些车商认为这种对未来的憧憬是（正如亨利•福特以前曾说过）不切实际的。人们会害怕，不敢坐着他们所不能控制的汽车开上高速公路：电脑会死机，对不？如果车商的自动驾驶软件卷入事故，那将可能面临贵到破产的诉讼费用，也就没有能力继续开发。

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. Google’s self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive; 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.

然而许多人已经在毫不知情的情况下乘坐无需人工操纵的飞机和火车旅行了。在这些技术的帮助下，向无人驾驶的转变正在逐步实现。汽车软件将学会人避免危险的技巧：比如，路上飞来一只球时人会刹车，因为可能会有孩子追过来。Google的自动驾驶汽车已经累计行驶超过70万公里，许多人永远都不可能开这么远。Google汽车所学到的一切都将运用到使用此软件的其它汽车上。对于无人驾驶的可靠性问题，应当修改法律，使得发生事故时法庭会对自动驾驶技术在总体上更安全加以考虑。

If the notion that the driverless car is round the corner sounds far-fetched, remember that TV and heavier-than-air 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.

如果说无人驾驶汽车时代即将到来的说法还不靠谱，那想想电视和比空气重的飞行器也曾经不靠谱。也许有一天人们会思考，为什么先人们会把像汽车一样危险的机器交给像人一样不可靠的操作员来操作。

From the print edition: Leaders

showcraft

理论上是可行的。但是有一个值得注意的问题，就是即便你的无人驾驶车已经成熟到可以规避任何可能由你引发的问题，你也无法阻止靠近你的非无人驾驶车由于人为失误而可能对你的车造成的损害。另外，一个理想的状态，便是无人车有一套独立的系统自行运行，另有一套系统，负责路上相邻的无人车之间实现联网通信，互为参考，加大安全系数。