In a New York Times opinion piece published today, a Stanford professor of computer science (Sebastian Thrun) and a product manager at Google (Anthony Levandowski) propose four ways Detroit can "save itself." The suggestions are striking for their prohibitively high costs and complexity, and frankly, I can't see how any would address the American automotive industry's single biggest problem: how to make cars that have fuel efficiency high enough to counter the rising cost of driving.

In a nutshell, they propose the following:

1. Prevent fatal traffic accidents by installing WiFi technology into all the nation's cars, traffic lights, bridges, and intersections, allowing each to "communicate critical information" with each other.
2. Fix the problem of highway congestion and allow people to relax behind the wheel by building robotic cars that drive in a tight formation automatically, creating what's called a "highway train."
3. Build cars covered with photovoltaic cells to save fuel and "reduce our dependence on foreign oil."
4. Connect cars to the Internet. This will enable people to (ready for this?) make restaurant reservations or place takeout orders all from their cars. They will also be able to purchases instantly the songs they hear on their new Internet radio. Installing sensors on such things as parking spaces too, the authors suggest, will help drivers save time and fuel.

Suggestion 1 does nothing for fuel efficiency and the task of equipping the nations cars, traffic lights, bridges, and intersections with WiFi devices would be a monumentally complex project of enormous cost. It would also take many, many years. Sure it would save some lives but remember the assignment was to save something else: Detroit! How many people decide not to buy an American car because, as the article suggests, fog can be such a terrible hazard at intersections?

Suggestion 2 is just plain ridiculous (as is the accompanying sketch of a "highway train" made up of robotic cars, all lined up in an orderly file on the highway). I'm not an engineer but I think this one belongs to the realm of science fiction. If it were feasible, as it may be in a decade or two, I think cultural issues would prevent it from functioning well. Moreover and yet again, the complexity and cost of pulling such a thing off would be enormous.

Suggestion 3 is probably the best of the bunch but the authors themselves acknowledge that as a technology, it's far from perfected. It's not a short-term solution to anything, really.

Suggestion 4 is the most puzzling, not only because it echos suggestion 1 so closely (yet with a different but equally insulting image) but because it's entirely unnecessary with smartphone technology already achieving most of what it suggests.

Overall, I think these suggestions reflect the professional mind-sets of the authors. Notice how each relates to the advancement of computer infrastructure and Internet use? There's absolutely nothing on new legislation, bio-fuels, or alternate business models.

The biggest failure of this piece is that it lacks a clear problem to solve. They claim to want to "save Detroit" yet give no explanation for what's broken about it.

I have my own ideas on this topic but what do you think? What is the problem and how would you "save Detroit?" More fundamentally, should it be saved at all? 

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