For all the excitement and hype surrounding autonomous vehicles, itâs worth remembering that, for most of the history of mankind, weâve been using vehicles that were capable of full autonomy. We call these vehicles âhorsesâ or sometimes âdonkeysâ or âcamelsâ or any number of other large, muscular mammals that weâve coerced into taking us from place to place. All of these are, of course, fully autonomous, and have been for thousands and thousands of years before any horse ever even saw a human.
Generally, horses and other animals squander their autonomy wandering around, eating lawns, having steamy horse sex and making new horses to start the whole thing over again. Once employed by humans for the purpose of transport, animals like horses became, effectively, semiautonomous vehicles.
Thereâs actually an accepted system in place for describing levels of autonomy for cars, known as the SAE (thatâs Society of Automotive Engineers, like the Freemasons but much worse dressers) automation levels. They break down like this:
Level 0: No automation, the human driver does all the driving.
Level 1: Driver assistance, an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) on the vehicle can sometimes assist the human driver with either steering or braking/accelerating, but not both simultaneously.
Level 2: Partial automation, an ADAS on the vehicle can actually control both steering and braking/accelerating simultaneously under some circumstances. The human driver must continue to pay full attention (âmonitor the driving environmentâ) at all times and perform the rest of the driving task.
Level 3: Conditional automation, an automated driving system (ADS) on the vehicle can perform all aspects of the driving task under some circumstances. In those circumstances, the human driver must be ready to take back control at any time when the ADS requests the human driver to do so. In all other circumstances, the human driver performs the driving task.
Level 4: High automation, an ADS on the vehicle can perform all driving tasks and monitor the driving environmentâessentially, do all the drivingâin certain circumstances. The human driver need not pay attention in those circumstances.
Level 5: Full automation, an automated driving system on the vehicle can do all the driving in all circumstances. The human occupants are just passengers and need never be involved in driving.
Based on our modern scales, Iâd have to say a vehicle composed of a horse and cart is somewhere between Levels 3 and 4: the âvehicleâ is in complete control, but some human intervention is required.
Of course, the manner in which a horse is autonomous is quite different from an electromechanical car. While the destination is pretty much a given for an autonomous car, thanks to GPS, the horse doesnât necessarily know it. What a horse does know are the fundamental mechanics of driving. A horse inherently knows how to stay on a road, follow a path, avoid obstacles, stop if confronted with confusion or danger, make turns, look for potential hazards, and so on. What the horse relies on the human for are inputs regarding the desired speed of travel and guidance to maintain a proper path.
With a horse-car, youâre not âsteeringâ the horse in the same way that you steer a carâthe horse is handling those mechanics. Youâre guiding the animal to your destination, and, in some cases, the horse may even know familiar routes and paths, so what the driver needs to do in a horse-car can be pretty minimal.
We forget just how much natural processing an equine brain is doing to drag a streetcar along a pathâitâs essentially what weâre currently trying to make automated vehicles (AVs) do. It should remind us that getting a car safely to your desired destination requires a very specific set of skills, and thereâs no reason to assume that, as humans, weâre somehow hardwired to know how to do it. In fact, the fates of the two earliest human-driven automobiles speak directly to how unprepared we were, and how difficult the basic task of piloting a moving machine really is.
An automobile is any self-propelled wheeled machine designed to transport passengers and/or cargo. What powers that carâas long as itâs mechanical in nature, somehow, doesnât really matter. A steam car is as much an automobile as a gasoline, diesel, or electric car. I want to make that abundantly clear in case anyone reading over your shoulder decides to pedantically correct this book. If someone does, please tell them to get bent.
The first machine that we can really call an automobileâa self-propelled, mechanical, wheeled machine driven by a humanâÂwas Nicolas-Joseph Cugnotâs 1769 steam dray.
(I know Mercedes-Benz likes to talk about how they invented the car; they cite the 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen as the first example. Donât be taken in by this self-serving bit of historical revisionism.)
Cugnotâs steam dray was designed to be an artillery-hauling truck, basically, and as such was designed in a way that made handling pretty terrible. Really, you probably couldnât design a worse vehicle to drive than Cugnot did, but, in his defense, no one had any idea what the hell âhandlingâ was or what âdrivingâ would be like, or anything at all like that. These problems simply didnât exist before Nick-Joe fired up the huge, teapot-like boiler on the steam dray.
This first car, being designed to haul heavy artillery, cannonballs, and other massive iron things, was designed with all the mechanical parts (and weight) well up front, with a large, flatbed-like area at the rear. The solitary and massive front wheel was driven by steam pistons, and in front of the wheel hung the massive, heavy boiler.
The driver of this thing was expected to steer with a set of handlebars that looked like a steampunk bullâs horns, and that driver would likely need the strength of a steampunk bull to be effective. The vehicle was designed to be balanced when piled high with cannonballs or towing cannon. Laden, the balance would likely have been better, but the whole thing would have been so heavy as to be deeply ungainly. Unladen, it would have been lighter, but with all the weight on the one front wheel, steering would have been a nightmare.
Cugnot not only invented the automobile, he invented lethal understeer.
Understeer, when a car turns less sharply than desired, is what happens with nose-heavy, front-wheel drive cars because they naturally want to go in straight lines. Cugnotâs steam dray was a ridiculous caricature of this design, and as a result, the first test ended up with Cugnot driving it into a wall, which he partially demolished. The second test didnât fare much better; the truth is that I doubt the steam dray could have been driven effectively. The design was far too unforgiving and difficult and, whatâs more, nobody had any idea how to drive.
The next attempt at an automobile was built by William Murdoch in 1784 and seemed to recognize the layout issues that Cugnotâs vehicle had, and pretty much corrected them. Too bad it only existed as a subscale working model. If it had been built to human scale, itâs likely it would have been far more drivable than the Cugnot car.
In 1801, the invent-cars project was renewed with the help of a Cornish man named Richard Trevithick who built a crude but full-scale test vehicle, the Puffing Devil. In 1803, he built a much more realized vehicle, arguably the very first passenger car designed to be a passenger automobile from the start, the London Steam Carriage.
The Puffing Devil was a proof-of-concept test of locomotion; it didnât really have any steering mechanism, or a real passenger compartment. It wasnât âdrivenâ in the sense we understand driving today, which is why we should focus on the London Steam Carriage, which had an actual steering mechanism and a place for passengers. It was a real car, and as such could be driven. Its steam engine was set low in the tall chassis and toward the rear, controlling the rear wheels. A lone steering wheel up front was turned via a simple tiller. It was a basic design, but it was effective. The center of gravity was pretty low for such a tall vehicle and the steering mechanism worked, even if it required two peopleâone to stoke and manage the engine at the rear, and one to steer up front.
This division of labor necessitated communication between the two partiesâas if you, while driving, had to yell at your feet to get off the gas pedal and get on the brake. Even with the task of driving divided between two peopleâwho didnât know how weird that would one day seem because nobody had ever done this beforeâthe act of driving proved difficult.
To Trevithick and his teamâs credit, they did manage to drive it a bit on the first try, about 10 miles, at speeds between 4 and 9 mph, but the next night they managed to wreck it.
There is a pretty good recounting of the wreck in the Life of Richard Trevithick: With an Account of His Inventions, Volume 1.
They kept going on for four or five miles, and sometimes at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour. I was steering, and Captain T...