Neal Rubin

The Detroit News

I had a question about autonomous cars: How prepared do you have to be to retake the wheel?

The editor of Cars.com had a better one: How many dead drivers constitute a success?

The answer to my question was, it depends.

The answer to Joe Wiesenfelder’s question is largely the same, even if you recast it in a more positive way — how many drivers have to stay alive to prove the worth of autonomous cars to an understandably confused public?

With preview week off and rolling at the North American International Auto Show, the biggest stories Monday came from press conferences. Toyota showed off a remade Toyota Camry, Ford announced the return of the Ranger and Bronco, and the future hits and misses kept on coming.

Looming over everything at Cobo Center, though, is the arrival (at some point) of self-driving vehicles (of some sort).

Whether you clap politely or applaud wildly about that is up to you. Whether you can do that while your car is moving is up to the vehicle and to the definition of autonomy.

Senior Vice President Bill Foy, the head of the engineering division for DENSO, drives a Ford Explorer with a lane-keeping system and assisted braking. Both are pieces of the technology that will eventually let mainstream cars pilot themselves.

They’ll probably come into play “for 20 seconds of the whole vehicle life,” Foy says. But two of those seconds came on I-696, headed toward the Lodge Freeway turnoff, when a truck stopped in front of him and his brakes applied themselves with extreme vigor.

Count him as a fan of autonomous technology, as well as a supplier. Do not count him as one of Wiesenfelder’s statistics, though, pro or con.

About those smooth roads

When Wiesenfelder says “the expectations for autonomous driving will be extremely high,” he means Jetsons-style autonomy, where the car does all the work while the driver checks e-mail or learns to juggle.

The gradations before then will be uneven, and for some people imperceptible. If someone else’s lane assist keeps your 2000 Mercury Sable from getting sideswiped, you’ll never know.

But down the road — 2020? 2030? — society will be keeping score.

There were 35,092 motor vehicle deaths in the United States in 2015, the most since 2008. The theory is that autonomous cars will be better at driving than we are, but how much better do they need to be?

If fatalities dropped to, say, 24,000, “would that be enough?” Wiesenfelder asks. “I think for most people, no.”

We’ll be looking for perfection, he theorizes, from a new technology with not only moving parts, but stationary ones. As tested today, autonomous cars need relatively smooth roads and bright, clear lane markings to keep sensors in balance and on point.

Here in the pothole capital of the Upper Midwest, we have some work to do.

When to take the wheel

In the ZF booth at the auto show, there’s a steering wheel that converts to a computer keyboard with cupholders. That’s a level of inattention we’re not ready for, technologically or emotionally.

Among the issues for engineers to work out is how to quickly redirect drivers’ attention when their autonomous or semi-autonomous cars cry out for help. ZF favors an electronic tug on the seat belt.

For Chuck Vossler of BMWBLOG.com, all it took last week was a nudge from the safety engineer in the passenger seat: Hey, time to press the blue button on the steering wheel and start driving again.

Vossler, who lives in Kansas City, Kansas, tested a fully autonomous BMW 5 Series prototype in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. He drove along the Strip, then let the system take over on I-15 — “Hands off, feet off, eyes off.”

There was a product engineer in the back seat for expert advice and a BMW 7 Series in front of him, in case things went haywire and something needed to absorb a collision. Vossler pulled out a camera and started snapping pictures two-handed, and no one objected.

Some time earlier, he had driven a Tesla S equipped with Autopilot 1.0, a less comprehensive system. For that ride, he kept his hands lightly in his lap, poised to grab the wheel.

“I didn’t want to crash a $140,000 automobile,” he explains.

In a high-tech world, there’s nothing quite so painfully low-tech as a phone call to your insurance agent.

nrubin@detroitnews.com

@nealrubin_dn