A Driverless Car Broke Down While Shuttling Members of Congress Around

If driverless cars are ever going to become common, they're going to need to be backed by lawmakers and legislators. A good way to get that backing would be for the cars to avoid breaking down while driving around members of Congress.

Tuesday, Carnegie Mellon's driverless car ferried around several members of Congress, including House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, who invited the self-driving 2011 Cadillac SRX to the city. According to Meredith Shiner of Yahoo News, the car broke about halfway through the day. She said that the city had to re-rig different intersections throughout the route over the course of three months for the demo.

But the car didn't crash or anything, it merely broke down like any other car could have, according to Raj Rajkumar, the Carnegie Mellon University professor who helped design it. The plan is to take lawmakers out again today.

"The vehicle did not malfunction and performed well as expected. We gave rides to several legislators and all the rides went well," he told me in an email. "Since the ride was popular, the vehicle had been running for more than 6 hours. Since it was a hot day, one component eventually overheated and failed to start when the vehicle was still parked."

That seems to be the case, because the car is supposed to be back on the road today. It's also good news for driverless car enthusiasts—much better the car fail to start up when it's sitting parked somewhere than cut off during a drive. While killing a member of Congress in a crash would not be a good look, merely inconveniencing one isn't a big deal, because they don't get much done these days, anyway (jokes, jokes).

Rajkumar has posted several videos of the car navigating DC traffic, going through highway tunnels and that sort of thing. No lawmakers are shown in the videos.

"In addition to its autonomous driving capabilities, this vehicle also allows seamless switching between autonomous and manual driving. The driver can override the vehicle's decisions in an instant. We did this a couple of times to ensure the safety of passengers both inside and outside the vehicle," Rajkumar wrote on the university's website.

"If a car cuts in or a pedestrian steps right in front of any moving vehicle, the vehicle will take a finite amount of time to stop posing possible collisions. Our human non-driver is therefore instructed to be cautious at all times and take over manual operations whenever he deems it appropriate, erring on the side of caution," he added.

The Carnegie Mellon car is different than the Google one—it has no rapidly-rotating LIDAR sensor on the top of the roof. It looks like a normal car on the inside and outside, the university says. But Google has already one-upped the university when it comes to showing off its tech to lawmakers.

Google's experience with DC went more smoothly—two years ago, the company brought a car to DC to drive around city council members. I was living in DC at the time and saw the car whiz by my bike a few times. The technology seemed to work, with no need to rejigger any intersections.

"It’s really nothing more than a speed bump—and we’re bound to have even bigger ones as development continues on this important technology. Imagine the backlash that will happen when one of these cars has a real accident (as will inevitably happen)," Chunka Mui, a driverless car expert who wrote the book The New Killer Apps, told me in an email. "It’s important to measure the technology against the alternatives, rather than against perfection. Still, this was an unfortunate failure given how important trust and confidence is to the acceptance and adoption of this technology."

What happened with Carnegie Mellon may have been minor, but if driverless cars are going to be accepted by lawmakers—and they're certainly going to have to be—these demonstrations need to go smoothly. There's no use in a driverless car in which the city needs to be retrofitted before it works.

“Actually riding in the driverless vehicles goes a long way to demystifying this technology, so it was right to try and give more policy influencers a first hand experience," Mui said. "A demo is worth a thousand pages of a business plan. But you’ve got to get it right!"