of this is thanks to one blind man and his lawyer—who couldn’t drive and talk at the same time.
1956: GM Firebird II Concept Car
The first time a major carmaker presented the idea of real autonomy to the public was in 1956, when GM showed their concept car, the Firebird II. As the name implies, this wasn’t the first Firebird concept car, but it was the first of the Firebird concept cars to suggest a then still-fictitious world of automated driving.
The Firebird concept cars were designed by Harley Earl and were heavily influenced by jet fighter designs. The Firebirds were showcases for cutting-edge technology, and as such employed exotic gas-turbine drivetrains, and cathode-ray tubes (CRTs—you know, the old big tube kind) in its television- and camera-based rearview systems.
More important for our purposes, though, is the automatic driving system that GM imagined for the car. This wasn’t just a concept for the car itself, but rather an entire network for automated vehicles, including specially prepared roadways with integrated “conductor strips” and control towers in the “Autoway Safety Zone,” the name given to the automated highway system in the film.
GM describes the system in a brochure published for the Firebird II’s introduction at GM’s Motorama show at the 1956 World’s Fair:
This amazing concept places control of the motorcar in the hands of an “electronic brain”—actually releasing the driver from the wheel. . . . These include a Dashboard View screen which has two panels. The left panel is for “internal communication” between car and driver (information he would normally receive from visible instruments as to fuel supply, engine operation and temperature). It also reveals a radar pattern when he guides the car onto the electronic control-strip for automatic steering. . . .
Extending from the two engine air scoops on each side of the nose of the car are probes or antennas which pick up wave impulses from the conductor strip in the center of the control lane.13
Of course, none of these things actually worked, but it is interesting to see how the very sticky problems of computer vision could be avoided if fully autonomous operation is limited to areas where an infrastructure has been built to guide the cars.
No mention is made of obstacle avoidance or anything like that; presumably, it is the job of the singing gentlemen in the control towers to make sure everything is running smoothly and to warn drivers to stop if they’re approaching a broken-down vehicle or a coyote on the road or something else they don’t want to barrel through. I’m not confident that would have worked out so hot.
Really, this sort of system is more like a hybrid of a tram or trolley car type of vehicle combined with a conventional car. On roads with the proper control towers and guidance strips, the car cedes control to the roadway network, much like a tram or train. On roads without the necessary hardware, you’re just driving a normal car, even if it is powered by a kerosene-fueled turbine and has a clear bubble dome.
Because of the very significant infrastructure investments required in such a system, nearly all modern self-driving technology and research is designed to work without outside, physical infrastructure help, which is, of course, a much more difficult task.
One more thing about the Firebird concept, and, specifically, the film GM made to promote it. The film shows a family on a road trip in their Firebird, enjoying all of the considerable comforts of 1950s-envisioned 1976 future life. At one point, based on the recommendation from the guy in the control tower who assures them that the “hostess is a dream,” they contact a nearby hotel on their dashboard video screen, where they see a lovely woman who sings the praises of the hotel.
At one point in the song she tells them about the restaurant at the hotel, and sings this line: “Our pre-digested food is cooked by infra-red!” I think it’s safe to say that what people are likely to find appealing has changed dramatically from what it was in the 1950s.
1957: RCA Labs and the State of Nebraska’s Experimental Highway
Well, “highway” is a bit generous, since this was just a four hundred-foot stretch of road, but you get the idea. A Nebraska state traffic engineer named Leland Hancock was very taken by the idea of automatic control of cars on the highway to help combat driver error and fatigue, and to prevent accidents, and was determined to get others interested in the idea. Thanks to a lot of determined letter writing, he was able to get researchers at the RCA Corporation to work with him. Together they arranged to lay coils of wire at the intersection of US Route 77 and Nebraska Highway 2 as the roads were being built.14
On October 10, 1957, the development team carried out a test, witnessed by eighty-three people. Using a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air with antenna coils mounted on the bumper, a special meter in the car, and a partially obstructed windshield, a driver was able to drive on the road and follow its course by watching the deviation of the meter’s needle. If the car got too close to a car in front of it, an alarm sounded, ringing a bell and flashing a light until the car slowed down enough to open the distance to an acceptable level.
While the car wasn’t doing the driving, relying on a person to actuate the controls, it did replace the human driver’s need for vision; if researchers had chosen to, the system could have been rigged to actuate the car’s controls directly.
1960: UK Transport and Road Research Laboratory’s Experimental Four Miles of M4
In an experiment quite similar to the RCA/State of Nebraska one, the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) of Crowthorne, Berkshire, in the United Kingdom buried a four-mile-long length of cable beneath the stretch of the M4 motorway between Slough and Reading.15 The cable was laid, as in Nebraska, while the road was being built, and experiments were performed on the stretch of road before it was opened to the public.
Stills from Key to the Future, GM’s film about the Firebird II, showing its automatic driving features and the control towers of the Autoway Safety Authority. This is worth watching because there’s lots of singing involved.16
An early 1960s experiment using a Standard Vanguard was quite similar to the Nebraska/RCA one: the car had its windscreen obscured with cardboard, and information about steering was conveyed via an indicator mounted to the dashboard.
A more sophisticated experiment followed, this time using a Citroën ID19. The Citroën had an advanced hydropneumatic suspension system, and this high-pressure hydraulic system was used to drive actuators for the steering, brakes, and throttle. Using the system and receiving guidance information from the embedded cable, the Citroën was able to drive completely independently, and was tested at speeds up to 80 mph, as well as in ice and snow. It performed remarkably well in all the tests. But while results were promising, it was determined that implementation would be too costly based on (in hindsight, woefully conservative) estimates of future traffic growth; the TRRL was ordered to stop development and research on the project.
1961 to 1979: The Stanford Cart
While not designed to actually
