Retro Report

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Cars today come packed with so much software that they are routinely described as computers on wheels. Computers are prone to occasional glitches, are they not? One can imagine a latter-day Ralph Nader at some point taking on the modern auto industry with a jeremiad about the potential perils of microchipped cars, maybe in a book titled "Unsafe at Any Click."

If automotive experts are right, safety imperatives are leading inexorably, and rapidly, to the ultimate computer on wheels: a supersmart car that drives itself, with humans just along for the ride. The rush toward this future has Retro Report's attention, though in a manner consistent with its mission of first examining where we have been, the better to see where we may be headed. The heart of this week's video documentary is the long struggle over a car safety feature that everyone now takes for granted. That would be air bags. As the video shows, America's major automakers, for decades, heaped scorn on them and resisted making them standard equipment. In the past, dismissiveness tended to be Detroit's reflexive attitude toward many new ideas, whether for improving passenger safety or increasing fuel efficiency. Even recently, the board of directors at General Motors — the "new GM" — was slow to react to revelations about safety failings that have led th! is year to the recall of nearly 30 million vehicles.

A protagonist in this struggle is Mr. Nader, who irrevocably altered the national conversation about American-made vehicles with his 1965 book, "Unsafe at Any Speed." General Motors, then the dominant car manufacturer, reacted to Mr. Nader's charges with the far-from-brilliant tactic of spying on him and trying to lure him into compromising positions. Mr. Nader prevailed, to the extent that his safety campaign helped lead to standardized seatbelts, including shoulder restraints.

At the start, 40 years ago or so, most people could not be persuaded to buckle up; this was before states passed laws mandating seatbelt use. Soon enough, interest turned to the air bag, a "passive" instrument that required no action by the driver and the passenger. If their car crashed, a balloonlike cushion would pop up on its own to protect them. Naturally, installing this device would make a car more expensive. In their fashion, the big auto companies balked, a stance that they maintained for many years, until their resistance finally wore out.

Not that air bags were perfect. They were initially designed with 165-pound adults in mind. That made smaller people, especially children, vulnerable to injury from the explosive force of the air bag's opening. In the 1990s, 175 people died in this manner, more than 100 of them children, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Terrible as that toll was, it lay in the balance against nearly 6,400 lives said to have been saved by air bags in that decade. Later improvements corrected many of the one-size-doesn't-fit-all shortcomings, though problems remained. A New York Times investigation, its results published on Friday, found that exploding air bags produced by a Japanese supplier were linked to two deaths and dozens of injuries in vehicles from Honda and other automakers. Slowly across the past decade, millions of potentially troubled vehicles have been recalled.

Retro Report takes the discussion to another level by studying the possibility, even the likelihood, that the old fuss over air bags will someday seem as quaint as safety concerns about blacksmith shops. Will future vehicles even need these gadgets? Cars are becoming marvels of artificial intelligence, able to avert accidents entirely with sensors that, for instance, can warn a motorist that he or she is veering perilously into someone else's lane or getting too close to the vehicle up ahead.

The grail — it will be left to others to decide if it qualifies as holy — would be to remove the greatest threat of all to road safety: the driver. Human error is believed to be responsible for 90 percent of automobile crashes, making it the leading cause of the 33,000 motor vehicle deaths a year in the United States. (That toll is significantly down from an annual 50,000 or more in the late 1960s and early '70s, pre-air bags and mandatory seatbelts. Still, even these days, about as many Americans die on the road over a typical three-year period as were killed in all of the country's wars since World War II.)

Google and some major auto manufacturers — not averse to change this time — are busily experimenting with autonomous cars, meaning driverless. Robots, the thinking goes, will sense lurking danger and take corrective action. A robot's judgment is not clouded the way a human's can be. It does not have one too many at a favorite bar. It does not nod off at the wheel. It does not succumb to road rage, at least not yet as best as anyone can tell.

But will humans, notably of the American variety, happily yield control of their beloved cars to a robot? True, automated systems like cruise control have been around for decades. Nonetheless, doubts about computers are hard-wired into many people, a distrust enhanced by popular culture. Who could forget the villainous nature of the machines in films and books like "I, Robot," the "Terminator" movies, "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Colossus: The Forbin Project"?

Setting aside the future potential of driverless cars, the immediate reality of artificial intelligence software at the wheel is hardly worry-free. If cars are effectively computers, could malicious hackers figure out how to seize control of them, even cause mass death? More prosaically, what if a computer on wheels freezes, as any computer is prone to do? Say it freezes for a mere three seconds. In three seconds, a car going 65 miles an hour will cover almost the length of a football field. Imagine traveling at that speed over that distance with no one — or no thing — effectively in control. Flaws that in the last few years forced companies like GM, Toyota and Honda to recall millions of vehicles are not likely to reassure the techno-wary.

Then there are privacy issues. Cars today can collect, in some instances for the benefit of auto insurance companies, all manner of data, like how fast people drive, how hard they brake, where they have traveled. The automobile and the open road have long been symbols of American freedom. How free are you if your every move is tracked? And how much information about yourself are you willing to share with a machine? A BMW video mentioned in this Retro Report features a soft-voiced announcer saying, "Imagine your car could sense your desires." Is that, some humans may wonder, truly desirable?

Then again, auto companies were not alone years ago in chafing at innovations like seatbelts and air bags. Many motorists also had to be convinced. In time, they were. So maybe they will get used to being shepherded by robots. That includes some who have been known to give their cars names. Just to be on the safe side, though, they might want to resist calling any machine Hal.

The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former "60 Minutes" producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today's 24/7 news cycle. Previous Retro Report videos can be found here, and articles here.