Category Archives: Engineering

Part break bridge

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Tim Worstall alerts me to an update on the bridge collapse in Florida, which I wrote about here and here.

A doomed design was the “probable cause” of the horrific collapse of a pedestrian bridge in Miami last year that killed six people and injured 10, the National Transportation Safety Board found Tuesday.

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A peer review that failed to detect the calculation errors by designer FIGG Bridge Engineers – and an engineer’s failure to recognize the importance of cracking before the collapse – contributed to the tragedy, the board said.

My initial thoughts when I heard about the collapse were:

A lot of companies have subcontracted out the actual work – designing, building, manufacturing, operating, maintaining – and instead busy themselves with “managing” the whole process. This involves lots of well-educated people in nice clothes sitting in glass-fronted office buildings sharing spreadsheets, reports, and PowerPoint presentations by email and holding lengthy meetings during which they convince one another of how essential they are.

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In such an environment, it is inevitable that the quality of work suffers, errors go unnoticed, and – occasionally – catastrophes occur.

So I got the errors going unnoticed part right. I also said:

I’d be willing to bet a hundred quid the calculations and finite element modelling were done outside the US to save money, or subcontracted to another company, and supervision – which involves expensive Americans – was at nowhere near the levels it should have been. Regardless of where they were done, I’d also be willing to bet the company spent more manhours on progress meetings and overly-detailed weekly reports to let the management know what was going on than they did checking the engineering calculations.

Here’s what the article says:

NTSB staffer Dan Walsh said the construction was “high-risk” because of the complex design of the bridge. But he added that the school was overseeing the project, and the state Transportation Department was not required to have an inspector on site.

“Our recommendations address this issue, that FDOT should have more authority on this type of project,” Walsh said.

Uh-huh. The school awarded the job to MCM, perhaps on the basis of a glossy brochure on how committed they were to diversity and inclusion, and MCM handed the bridge design work off to FIGG and didn’t bother to supervise them or make sure their calculations were sound. Nor did they think anything was wrong when FIGG started tensioning the bridge trusses over live traffic, which would have had me blowing whistles and waving red flags without knowing the first thing about bridges. Result: collapsed bridge and dead people.

The board issued several recommendations to ensure that additional guidance will allow designers to better determine loads; that plans will undergo peer review by a qualified independent firm.

This doesn’t happen already?! When I got a crane built for an oil company in Nigeria, I used a specialist crane design company in the Netherlands and then got the entire design, including the calculations, verified by an independent third-party certification body. The same outfit also witnessed the load test and signed off on it. I thought this was standard.

FIU President Mark Rosenberg lauded the project when the section was dropped into place days before the tragedy.

“FIU is about building bridges and student safety,” Rosenberg said. “This project accomplishes our mission beautifully.”

If an accident happens on an oil and gas construction site resulting in fatalities, the oil company is ultimately responsible because they own the job and they are obliged to use competent contractors thus ensuring the safety of all workers. They aren’t permitted to just point at the engineering and construction contractor and say “nothing to do with us”. This is why BP got clobbered for the Deepwater Horizon accident more than Transocean who owned the rig. Perhaps it’s time this ownership principle was extended to civil works in public places?

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SAT Bottom Girls

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This is pathetic:

It is a gross insult to female engineers to lower entry standards in order to accommodate them. As I’ve written before, the women who go into engineering are on average as good as the men and in individual cases often better. Sure, there’s some useless female engineers out there, but if I were to write about the useless male engineers I’ve come across in my career I’d need to call up my new webhosts and order more server space.

What this will do is cast doubt on the capabilities of any woman graduating from this university with an engineering degree, which means any female engineer worth her salt will give it a wide berth and go to study in an institution which believes she’s as capable as the men. The irony is the idiots discussing this in the clip don’t seem to have realised this, and they’re only interested in boosting the number of women studying engineering, for demented reasons of social justice that dictate women should be represented in any given profession to the same proportion they exist in society. Unless, of course, the job involves working outside, at night, under machinery, on the slippery deck of pitching boat, underground, or halfway up a telecoms mast. Oddly, you don’t hear much about the lack of gender diversity in a fishing fleet.

They begin cretinously by saying that women are put off studying engineering because it’s a male-dominated environment. I have yet to hear a prospective female engineer actually say this, nor any actual female engineers. Indeed, quite a few seem to like that the field is male dominated. As one Russian told me, she prefers working with men because “they are simpler”. The only women I hear making this assertion are those whose mental facilites stretched only so far as to allow them to take courses in gender studies or some other useless branch of the social sciences. They’ve probably never even met a decent female engineer, let alone got to know one.

It also overlooks the fact that lots of women study chemical engineering, quite a few study civil engineering and industrial engineering, a handful study mechanical engineering, and almost none electrical engineering. If women are put off studying engineering due to the presence of too many men, they’d have to know the gender breakdown of each discipline before they even set foot in the class. Which they don’t, and even the morons who make a living out of complaining about it don’t.

What we’re seeing here is the result of women’s choice, freely made with all the information at their fingertips. For whatever reason, women choose to study biology, chemistry, medicine, law, and psychology rather than engineering, maths, and physics. Modern feminists are attempting to address this by insulting their smarter sisters, coming on television to say they ought to be responsible for designing the women’s toilets in airports. The people at the university behind this decision ought to resign and look for a job they might be good at, perhaps on a sewage farm in the outback somewhere.

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Pride before the stall

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A couple of readers sent me the link to this story:

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.

In May I wrote a post about how I thought the cause of the Boeing 737 Max crashes was as much organisational failure as technical fault. The Devil’s Kitchen reposted it on Facebook and someone appeared in his comments:

His response is pretty much what you’d expect from an engineer: appeal to his own authority and then dive head first into the details of his own area of expertise thus missing the broader point. Nobody is saying that diversity policies at Boeing caused the technical failure. Instead, I am talking about organisational failure whereby a company which is prioritising diversity to the extent they have 42 councils devoted to the issue is likely to lose focus on other areas. This in turn leads to poor practices being adopted and standards dropping in certain places, which combine to deliver less than optimal outcomes. Sometimes this manifests itself in higher staff turnover, other times a less efficient production process, others lower revenues, and so on. In such an environment, the risk of a problem going undiscovered or kludged increases, and the more complex the organisation the greater that risk. This is organisational failure leading to technical failure.

One of the biggest hazards a complex organisation faces is losing control of its supply chain. This is what I think happened in the Miami bridge collapse: there were a lot of subcontractors and nobody seemed to be in overall charge. It’s not that the engineers were necessarily bad, it’s just the management didn’t seem to have an idea what was going on, let alone were in control. So getting back to the story of the Indian software engineers on $9 per hour, I doubt the root cause of the 737 Max malfunction was some ill-trained programmer tapping in the wrong code because he was distracted by the cricket. But what it does tell you is that Boeing appears to have lost control over its supply chain to the degree that practices are popping up in it which probably shouldn’t be there. This is organisational failure, and although it is not caused by having the top management so focused on diversity, the fact that the top management is focused on diversity is a reasonable indication of organisational failure. Which can be denied – right up until planes start dropping out of the sky.

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Subcontract Bridge

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Readers may remember my post about the footbridge in Miami which collapsed onto a road full of cars during installation. A Twitter follower sends me an update, and the first thing I notice is this:

The plans for Florida International University’s pedestrian bridge included an innovative design approach by FIGG Bridge Engineers.

So the bridge was designed by FIGG; the original news reports said the engineering was carried out by Munilla Construction Management (MCM). This link provides some clarity:

FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc. is the designer of the bridge, working for MCM.

Ah. In my original post I said:

A lot of companies have subcontracted out the actual work – designing, building, manufacturing, operating, maintaining – and instead busy themselves with “managing” the whole process. This involves lots of well-educated people in nice clothes sitting in glass-fronted office buildings sharing spreadsheets, reports, and PowerPoint presentations by email and holding lengthy meetings during which they convince one another of how essential they are.

…

In such an environment, it is inevitable that the quality of work suffers, errors go unnoticed, and – occasionally – catastrophes occur. Now I don’t know if that was the case at the Munilla Construction company, but somehow they’ve gone from an outfit who could deliver a project with their eyes closed to one that has just dropped a simple footbridge on eight lanes of highway. If I were investigating, I’d want to know who did the actual design and where it was done. I’d be willing to bet a hundred quid the calculations and finite element modelling were done outside the US to save money, or subcontracted to another company, and supervision – which involves expensive Americans – was at nowhere near the levels it should have been.

So I got the subcontracting part right. Were the calculations done outside the US? Well, FIGG is a US-based group but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a design office in Mexico employing number-crunching engineers on the cheap. But given the lead design engineer is called Denney Pate, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here. Back to the article:

Bolton Perez & Associates, the project’s construction engineering and inspection contractor

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It is possible that the project’s prime contractor, MCM, and its post-tensioning subcontractor, in attempting to fix the problems, made an error that caused the bridge’s single truss to crack and give way.

So here are two more subcontracted bodies. Now it’s not unusual to bring in specialist inspectors and technical services, but it does add to the complexity of who’s in charge and where responsibility lies meaning the project management needs to be spot-on.

An official with FIU asked a representative with Bolton Perez their opinion of FIGG’s presentation analysis. Bolton, Perez said they could not comment at the moment, but would “expedite” a response in 2-3 days, according to the notes.

It’s telling that there is no mention of MCM in this exchange. What were they doing, then? Getting ready for Pride month? This is also illuminating:

Rice, the Georgia forensic engineer, remains most perplexed over the designer’s use of a single truss. “That just blew me away,” he says. “To have a single truss like that is violating one of the first tenants of structural engineering—provide redundancy. If you’re going to make a truss bridge, you have at least two trusses,” he argues.

Okay, so this is what FIGG say on their website:

Bridges designed by FIGG are purposeful works of art, functional sculptures within the landscape, that are created through a careful analysis of the site, contextual and environmental sensitivity, and a regional approach that encompasses a community’s particular needs, as well as the realities of funding and maintenance.

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By capturing the powers of imagination, function, and technology, we build bridges that improve the nation’s infrastructure, while enhancing the appearance of communities across America and the quality of life for the people who live in them.

So they look nice but collapse during installation in a manner detrimental to the quality of life for those passing beneath them at the time.

There are two points to make here. Firstly, MCM seem to have been adding little value; the fact their name doesn’t even come up in descriptions of the engineers’ discussions speaks volumes. This supports my original theory that they were an outfit which is good at winning projects via connections and box-ticking, but cannot actually execute any meaningful work nor adequately supervise those that do. This is modern business in a nutshell.

Secondly, the whole thing points to colossal organisational failure in the face of serious technical problems. There are a lot of people involved without clear roles and responsibilities with everyone talking, sharing opinions, and a*se-covering but nobody in charge and accountable (I suspect the investigation into the Boeing 737 MAX will reveal similar patterns). This represents a regression in terms of organisational and technical capabilities.

Now granted I am speculating but the incontrovertible facts are cracks were detected in the truss structure before the installation attempt and the engineers knew about them, but they went ahead with the installation anyway without bothering to close the road to traffic. It then collapsed and killed people. If this isn’t massive organisational failure then I don’t know what is.

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Boeing down the pan

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I can’t say I’m overly surprised by the troubles Boeing is having with its 737 Max aircraft, which is now grounded until they can figure out how to stop it crashing. While the problem ultimately sounds technical (see also this post at the Continental Telegraph), this is the sort of thing which in the past proper business processes and management would have ensured didn’t happen.

I can’t claim to know how Boeing is run, but if they’re anything like most modern corporations they’ll prize unwavering loyalty to management diktat over and above competence, experience, honesty, courage, and character. Decision-making is likely to consist of bright young things in nice clothes giving PowerPoint presentations to their bosses telling them what they want to hear, and those bosses will do the same for their bosses right up through the hierarchy. If an engineer pipes up that something is badly wrong, he’ll be told in no uncertain terms to get with the program and realign his attitude or his career will suffer. In addition, it’s likely that as Boeing’s business became more about buttering up government and lobbying the FAA to turn a blind eye, they got worse at making planes which didn’t crash.

Back when I worked for an oil company they failed to deliver an expansion project in Russia on the third attempt. Twenty years before, when doing business in Russia was an order of magnitude harder, they’d managed to get the original facility built. Somewhere in the intervening period the company had lost substantial capability, not that anyone would admit it. I suspect the reason was experienced people retiring and being replaced by yes men and power skirts molded by a modern system of management which rewards aesthetics and compliance over getting stuff done. In other words, as companies increasingly obsess over process, diversity, and values they forget how to do their core business. On their corporate website Boeing boasts of:

Diversity Councils are integrated groups of site leaders, managers and employees, who work to improve employee engagement, provide learning and leadership opportunities, increase communication, and facilitate implementation of organizational diversity plans. Diversity councils are supported by a local executive champion. Boeing has more than 40 Diversity Councils.

40 diversity councils, and 2 catastrophic accidents of a new aircraft in the space of 5 months. Now air crashes are nothing new, but I can’t help feeling these two statistics are related. I also don’t think this is the last time we’ll be hearing a household name with a long history of excellence grappling with disasters that were wholly avoidable.

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Don’t mention the flaw!

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Once upon a time I was posted to a department in an oil company which dealt with the early-stage designs of new installations, much of which was geared towards providing enough information for a cost estimate to be carried out. To a rough order of magnitude, the cost of a new offshore installation (either floating or fixed to the seabed) can be estimated from its weight. Keeping things simple, the weight of an offshore facility comprises Equipment Weight, Piping Weight, Structural Weight, and Others. If you have enough data, it is theoretically possible to work out the total weight of a new offshore installation by taking just the Equipment Weight and applying various ratios from similar, existing facilities. Most large engineering companies do this in order to obtain order-of-magnitude weights and cost estimates, but it is very much a finger-in-the-air approach which, at the early stages of a project, is fine.

The problem with my new department was they did the equivalent of dividing 11.3 by 3.4 and writing the answer as 3.32352941. Any GCSE science or maths teacher will tell you the answer to any calculation cannot be more accurate than the initial input data. But when we did estimates using data with an accuracy of ± 30%, we’d make comparisons of estimates that were within 10% of each other and propose weight savings of 5%. If you think it’s just journalists who are innumerate, be aware there are engineers with the same affliction working in large oil companies.

Then things got a whole lot worse. Weight ratios apply to offshore facilities because they are designed as a single unit relatively unaffected by their location (I’m talking topsides or floaters here, not the jackets or other support structures). I’m simplifying massively, but the point is that the weights of floating and other offshore facilities are not primarily driven by where they are installed. By contrast, the cost and complexity of onshore installations is enormously impacted by topography and geotechnical conditions under the soil. As you can imagine, building a facility on flat, firm ground is a bit easier than doing so on the side of a granite mountain or in a marsh. Civil engineering accounts for approximately 30-40% of the cost of constructing an onshore oil and gas installation, mainly grading the site, bringing in aggregate and compacting, and building the vast underground networks of pipes and cables needed to run the thing. This is why the first things you do when you’re thinking about building an onshore plant is the topographical and geotechnical survey; it’s sort of hard to do anything without it.

But I worked with very clever people, and they came up with a way of estimating the costs of an onshore facility regardless of where it was located. Insofar as topography went we could just assume it was flat, and soil conditions could be ignored or data from a project on another continent used instead. That soil conditions can vary dramatically across a hundred metres didn’t seem to matter. Furthermore, we could use ratios to work out the weights like we did offshore. Now I spied a problem with this. Offshore, on a global basis, there is probably a relationship between Total Equipment Weight and Total Structural Weight; all equipment on such facilities is supported by structural steel, after all. But onshore equipment is generally placed on a concrete plinth sunk into the ground, the size of which is driven by the soil conditions and equipment weight. The structural steel supports some equipment and a lot of piping and cables, but it does a very different job to that on offshore facilities. In many instances, the structural steel around a piece of onshore equipment is negligible. In short, on an onshore plant there is no ratio from other facilities which can be used to estimate structural weight using equipment weight. But here were were, applying the same methodology as if it could.

Having some experience on onshore sites, I began to use my noggin a little. In one estimate, I ascertained that a vessel had no structural steel at all: it rested on its own legs and there was no maintainable valve on top which would need an access platform. But two managers queried this: they asked how the structural steel weight could be zero. I said it was because there is no structure associated with this vessel. They said this must be wrong, and I should apply a ratio of 30% vessel weight. So I asked them what structure they thought I was missing. They couldn’t say, but they told me to add the weight in, which came to several tonnes.

A little later, they got an intern with no post-graduate engineering experience to create a formal procedure for estimating the weights of onshore facilities, convinced that from such data the costs could be derived. They then passed it around all the engineers for comments. I noticed that it did not consider many components of the underground networks, which as I said comprises a huge portion of the costs. The most glaring omission was the firewater ring main, which is big, expensive, and common to all onshore oil and gas facilities. The reason this wasn’t included was because it would be designed “later”, which I found actually meant “nobody here knows anything about firewater ring mains so it’s best to pretend they don’t exist”.

I’d only been in the department a few weeks and I naively thought I’d be being helpful by pointing out, as I have done above, why this new methodology drawn up by the intern was fatally flawed. I drafted a comprehensive email with examples and explanations and sent it to my boss and the head of department, whose brainchild this new methodology was. A few days later I was called into an office where both of them were waiting and told to close the door. Their talk with me can be summarised as follows:

“We have read your email, but the decision has been made to adopt this methodology going forward. Your job is to follow it without asking questions.”

This was probably the first time it dawned on me that in many corporate departments results are meaningless, and all that matters is people obediently follow the process. I fought it for about a year, then just got with the program and pumped out absolute garbage which got wrapped up in more garbage and presented to senior management right up to the CEO. It didn’t take me long to work out whatever rubbish we were generating was not the basis on which decisions were getting made – the company wouldn’t be in business if that were the case – and the entire process, which cost millions of dollars, was merely to keep people employed. I once remarked in the wake of the oil price crash that if the company wanted to cut costs they could get rid of our entire department and employ a child to roll dice every time senior management wanted figures. That went down about as well as my critique of the estimation methodology.

The experience left me wondering how much of this sort of thing goes on in major corporations with names you’ve heard of. Quite a bit, would be my guess.

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How to pass exams in subjects you don’t understand

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Last semester on my MBA I studied five main subjects, one of which was Quantitative Business Methods (QBM). It quickly became apparent this consisted entirely of statistical analyses, of the sort I don’t think I’d done before. I studied statistics as part of maths A-level and I’m sure I must have done some during my engineering degree, but this definitely seemed new to me.

At the beginning, I couldn’t work out why anyone in business would need to carry out statistical analyses of the sort we were being taught, which was mainly about finding correlations and associations in data. I was rather surprised to discover it was possible to find associations in sets of qualitative data; until then I’d assumed you could only do so with quantitative data. Anyway, the chap teaching us was exceptionally knowledgeable about statistics and appeared to do advanced analyses for fun. He took us deep into the theory, and pretty soon stuff like this was appearing on the board:

I was never very good at maths and when it came to statistics I was very average indeed (did you see what I did there?), so a lot of this confused me. I reckon by the end I grasped about 60% of the theory, and that involved me dredging my memory banks for stuff I’d learned 20 years before. But many of my colleagues had no such background and struggled like hell; one had done a bachelors in tourism, which I’m reasonably sure doesn’t involve giant sigmas surrounded by numbers.

It wasn’t until three-quarters of the way through the semester that I cracked it. I’ve written before about my engineering degree and how I didn’t understand half of what the lecturer said, and the secret is that doesn’t matter. With most engineering subjects there’s a theory part and a practical part. Take for instance the concept of second moment of area. This is the basis for why I-beams make such good structural members: the stress in the beam under load is inversely proportional to its second moment of area. The maths behind the second moment of area disappeared from my understanding decades ago (assuming it was ever there) but the principle behind the second moment of area and the importance of the I-beam cross-section remained forever.

It would have been possible for the lecturer to simply say an I-beam is better than a rectangular hollow section just because, but that wouldn’t have made us very good engineers because we’d have no confidence in the statement. By showing us the mathematical theory behind it, we had that confidence even if we didn’t fully understand the theory. The exam, like many others on engineering subjects, tested our knowledge of the theory as well as its application. To pass the engineering exams it was important to figure out which parts of the theory you were going to be tested on, and how to apply it to the practical part of the question. You did this by asking the lecturer what would be on the exam, getting hold of past papers, and speaking to those in the year above. In other words, most of us got good (enough) at passing the exams and only a handful of the super-geniuses actually understood everything. This was sufficient to produce engineers who can work in industry, where knowledge of the theory isn’t required.

So I figured out that’s what was going on with this QBM course. The professor could easily have said if P(F<=f) is less than 0.05 then there is an association and we could thereafter apply that to datasets in future, but we’d have no confidence in it. So we got taught the theory, and this scared the hell out of everyone (including me in places). But towards the end it became apparent that we were only going to be tested on the application, i.e. how to generate descriptive statistics from a dataset and interpret them rather than the underlying theory, which made it an awful lot easier. From there, it was just a matter of boiling it down into those bits which are really important and disregarding the rest.

Some of my colleagues looked at me as if I was some sort of sorcerer, so I explained that I don’t understand it any more than they do, I just know how to apply the theory in a practical application and what numbers to look for when interpreting the results. I spent two hours before the exam giving several of my fellow students a crash-course in how to pass it, mainly by telling them what was important and what they could ignore. I’m not sure how they got on, but I passed with a good mark and I hope they did too.

Funnily enough, when I started reading the academic papers in preparation for my dissertation I realised the regression analyses being used to determine correlations and associations were those I’d just been taught in my QBM course, so I was actually able to understand the numerical results to some degree. Without that, I probably wouldn’t have any idea how they’d gone about it. Which is why why they teach it, of course. It’s been a while since I’ve learned a new discipline, and it feels rather good.

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Wishful thinking

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The other day, Soviet-born demented NeverTrumper Max Boot tweeted this:


Leave aside the silly notions that:

1. Running government is the same as flying an airplane: does a pilot need to juggle dozens of competing interests with one eye on his job between takeoff and landing?

2. Government is about qualifications: if it were, why bother with elections?

3. People who think they’re the sort of expert who should be in government ought to be anywhere near the levers of power.

Let’s instead look at the idea that we want the best qualified people to design buildings. Is it true? Well, I’ve been involved in some civil infrastructure projects and I recall the contracts were generally awarded to the local company with the strongest political connections. I’ve also been involved in several engineering tenders and although lip-service is paid to quality and track record, it generally goes to the bidder with the lowest price.

And then there’s this:

State, local and federal government agencies regularly make a certain number of contracts open to bidding from minority-owned business enterprises, or MBEs. This minority business certification is a designation given to companies with women or ethnic minorities in control or in ownership. Learning how to bid on minority government contracts involves securing appropriate forms of certification and identifying and applying for contracts posted by various state and federal government agencies.

So we want the best qualified to design buildings, do we? If only.

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The truth about self-driving cars

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Regular readers will know I’m rather skeptical about the prospect of self-driving cars (1, 2, 3) and so I listened with interest about what somebody in charge of a car manufacture had to say about them.

He first listed the five degrees of autonomy, with Level 5 – the highest – allowing the human occupant to remove his hands and switch his brain off any time, anywhere. This is what most people think of when they talk about self-driving cars, the ability to go to sleep in the back or be blind drunk leaving the car to take care of everything. At the moment, production cars are fitted with Level 1, which is basically driver assistance. Level 2, which allows the driver to drop their concentration a little, is being introduced slowly.

He then talked about five technical areas which will need to be tackled in order to have Level 5 autonomous cars. I’ll take them each in turn.

1. Computing

Modern cars currently have around 50 black boxes carrying out various functions. In a fully autonomous car, they will likely have a single computer split 5 ways, with the parts carrying out the safety-critical functions kept well separate from the bits that run the entertainment system. Raw computing power is unlikely to be an obstacle to the development of autonomous vehicles.

2. Antennae and Sensors

The number and variety of sensors and antennae an autonomous vehicle will need is mind-boggling, particularly if redundancy is considered and 2-out-of-3 voting required to avoid spurious trips. The antenna on the Google car can be seen in the picture below:

A fully-autonomous car would need about 5 of these, mostly for communication outside the vehicle. It would need multiple 5G connections as well being able to connect via wi-fi and satellite. Sensors will include radar and infra-red cameras, which must be kept clear of dust, dirt, and rain.

3. Decision Making

Here’s where it starts to get complicated. What does the car do with all this information it’s receiving? The software is going to have to come pre-programmed with every situation the car can conceivably encounter so it knows what it’s looking at. Even if we charitably assume self-learning AI will be fitted to the cars, automobile accidents are often such that the occupants, be they human or computer, don’t get a second chance. The sheer size of this task in achieving Level 5 autonomy for cars is unprecedented.

4. GPS Mapping

GPS for civilian use is accurate to around 3-15m, although considerably better when the US military is lobbing missiles through windows and cave entrances. Level 5 autonomous vehicles will need GPS mapping to be accurate to within centimeters. If the car comes with an incredibly accurate GPS map installed in its brain, what happens when the map changes? A new road could be easily updated, but roadworks? Will we rely on the South Pembrokeshire District Council to inform whoever makes the maps in an accurate and timely manner every time they dig up the street?

5. Control and Action

Once a car has figured out where it is and what’s in front of it, what action does it then take? Does it jam on the brakes, swerve, or carry on? Software that could handle this in a normal street environment is not even on the horizon, and probably won’t be for another twenty years at least.

He emphasised that these 5 areas only cover what is required in the car; the infrastructure required to support autonomous cars was an equally gargantuan technological challenge which national or city governments will have to deliver.

Our visitor compared the challenge of Level 5 autonomous cars to landing on the moon, only without the single, dedicated organisation driving it. He didn’t say whether he thought we could replicate the Apollo 11 mission today, but my guess is we wouldn’t stand a chance. For a start, there is a worrying lack of diversity in the picture below:

I asked him whether he thought, as I do, this is all just a pipe-dream and we might never see Level 5 autonomous vehicles. He replied that, in his opinion, the technology will advance while there is an obvious benefit for the additional cost, as was clearly the case for ABS brakes and traction control. So it could well be that we get to around Level 4 autonomy before the costs and effort to reach Level 5 outweigh any benefit.

One interesting thing he said was that the most obvious place to use autonomous vehicles was on motorways, where the environment is much more strictly controlled than on other roads. The trouble is, only around 3-5% of road deaths in Britain occur on motorways, with the bulk taking place in urban areas or on rural roads. This is because on motorways the relative speeds of the cars isn’t too dissimilar, so in a crash cars just tend to get bounced around a bit while all heading in the same general direction. By contrast, accidents on country roads tend to involve cars converging at speed, hitting stationary objects, or leaving the road altogether. Therefore, the easiest and most obvious place to have autonomous cars will not save many lives, which kneecaps one of the main arguments of their proponents.

He also mentioned the legal aspects of autonomous cars. Currently drivers are responsible for accidents, and individual drivers insured. With autonomous cars, it will be the manufacturers which will be responsible, and this will drastically change the legal and insurance landscape in any country which adopts them. He didn’t put this forward as a reason autonomous cars won’t happen, he just mentioned it as another thing to consider. Regarding the technological challenges, he didn’t think there was any chance Level 5 autonomous vehicles will be possible for at least twenty years. My guess is it’ll be a lot longer than that.

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The truth about electric cars

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Earlier this week we had a the head of a car manufacturer visit us and give us a couple of talks. The first thing I noticed was that he didn’t immediately start apologising for what his company does or grovel at the feet of our moral guardians and beg for forgiveness. Instead, he unashamedly said his company made cars of which they’re proud, and said the automobile represented an enormous leap in personal liberty. The fact that this was refreshing says a lot about modern corporations, whose CEOs are often found wringing  their hands while preaching moralistic piffle to placate a noisy minority who think any economic activity which makes people happy is evil. This chap was doing none of that, which made me like him right away.

Rather than speak about his company’s products, he instead spoke about the two major challenges the automobile industry is facing: electric vehicles and autonomous cars. On electric vehicles, he said pretty much the same as I have (1, 2) in that the battery technology is nowhere near mature enough to make the switch now, and probably won’t be for at least 20 years. He compared the power to weight ratio of Tesla’s batteries with the internal combustion engine in his company’s vehicles, as well as their respective useful lives. He thought there will be some improvements with a move to solid-state batteries, but without some sort of hydrogen cell electric cars aren’t going to replace petrol and diesel. He also spoke about the environmental effects of making, recycling, and disposing of batteries for the 100 million cars which are produced every year, including the mining of lithium. None of this will be new to readers of my blog. He didn’t go into the amount of copper that would be required to provide charging points in domestic streets on a national scale, but he did ask where the electricity was going to come from and whether it’s not a case of just shifting pollution from cities to somewhere else. I found all this interesting because it is so out of whack with current policy, which seems to be based on the notion that electric cars are just around the corner. This is from the BBC today:

A ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars should be brought forward by eight years to 2032, MPs have said.

The government’s current plans to ensure all new cars are “effectively zero emission” by 2040 were “vague and unambitious”, a report by Parliament’s business select committee said.

It also criticised cuts to subsidies and the lack of charging points.

The government said it aimed to make the UK “the best place in the world” to own an electric vehicle.

Politicians seem to think technological barriers to electric cars can be overcome by sheer force of will, as if car manufacturers are sitting on the solutions but are reluctant to apply them. I don’t know who is advising them, but given how the hard sciences have been corrupted by environmentalists and every institution in the land captured by lefties, it’s not too hard to imagine what form government consultations on electric cars takes. Even if they roped in a few representatives of car manufacturers, they’d probably just cave in under NGO and government bullying and tell them what they want to hear (with one eye on their pension and retirement date). My guess is these efforts will run into a brick wall, government-backed schemes will be scrapped having wasted millions in taxpayer cash, and the public will be left high and dry with the cars they’ve bought as official policy collapses into a confusing mess.

What our guest said about autonomous cars I shall write in another post.

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