that 11,506 people died between 1979 and 2013 as the result of car chases. Many of them were bystanders.LA’s Highway 405 is like a drag strip for chases, even the slow-mo kind, like the infamous 90-minute pursuit of O.J. Simpson in this white Ford Bronco.It’s because of these grim statistics that police brass now discourage high-speed pursuits. “We do traffic enforcement to make people safe,” says Lt. David Ferry of the Los Angeles Police Department.
The state of our streets might seem bleak, but the coming age of autonomous vehicles should shift us into a safer gear. If law-abiding conveyances can move about without drivers sitting at 100-percent attention, and with them, many traffic violations—both accidental and calculated—reducing the need for patrol cars altogether.
Things get even trickier when would-be criminals get their hands on a car’s schematics. Missy Cummings, a former US Navy fighter pilot and a professor in Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, says turning an autonomous vehicle into an agent of chaos will require only a basic understanding of how it works. Lidar, for example, is the laser-based detection system that sits atop most self-driving test cars today. You don’t have to know what it is to disrupt it, only where it is.
Lidar is hardly the only vulnerability. The typical driverless toolkit consists of three other susceptible sensors: cameras at the front and back, GPS connected to positioning satellites, and a radar that bounces radio waves off nearby objects to let the car know its place in space. Artificial intelligence analyzes the data from all four sensors and uses it to inform future decisions.
A determined criminal, Humphreys says, could jailbreak the car’s central brain by altering the software and allowing the hacker to speed, or direct the car manually. A culprit will be able to manipulate other vehicles too. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems may also let AVs cruise, merge into traffic, and exit highways in sync with other cars on the road. By sending false messages, Humphreys says, you could clear freeways, cause crashes, and even turn police roadblocks against themselves.