Ridah Ben-Amara was an early casualty in what has become an ongoing war between Uber and the D.C. Taxicab Commission, which enjoyed the support of the city council. Over the next year and a half, this alliance of prison guards sought to impose on Uber a minimum fare that was five times that of a taxi, to disqualify vehicles less than 3,200 pounds (targeting Uber’s hybrid cabs), to require credit-card processing through the meter (which Uber’s cab partners could not do), to require the company to share data about its rides with the DCTC every twenty-four hours, and to ban any operator with a fleet smaller than twenty vehicles (many Uber drivers work independently).15 These proposals were intended to undermine Uber’s operation in the District. Most were defeated after aggressive grassroots campaigns organized by Uber. (The company has been remarkably successful at harnessing its loyal customer base to defend itself politically.)
Uber has faced the same fight in nearly every city it has entered. Prison guards in city governments and taxi commissions consistently abuse their power to protect the taxi companies from competition. In New York, regulators forced Uber to shut down taxi service last year, and lawsuits from the city’s livery companies have complicated its efforts to return.16 In Las Vegas, Uber ran up against a regulation that established a forty-dollar minimum rate for all livery services.17 In Chicago, the taxi companies sued Uber for trying to “cash in on [their] good name” and for allegedly confusing customers (though Uber said it had received no complaints).18 The Boston suburb of Cambridge said the company could not use GPS to meter rides until the National Institute of Standards and Technology set technical guidelines for the ubiquitous location service (which is accurate to within a couple of feet).19 Uber’s vocal customers defeated most of these efforts as well.
Uber has been the most prominent challenger of the taxi monopoly, but the prison guards have been equally vicious in trying to stamp out similar startups like Hailo and SideCar. FlightCar, a service that allows travelers at the San Francisco airport to rent their cars to incoming visitors while they’re away, was hit with a lawsuit in June for failing to comply with all the regulations that apply to the big rental car chains like Hertz and Avis.20
Tesla, the luxury electric car company started by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, is under regulatory assault in a number of states for trying to sell its cars directly to consumers over the internet rather than through dealer franchises as the major car companies do. The Wall Street Journal reported: “The focus of the power struggle between Mr. Musk and auto dealers is a thicket of state franchise laws, many of which go back to the auto industry’s earliest days.… Dealers say laws passed over the years to prevent car makers from selling directly to consumers are justified because without them auto makers would use their economic clout to sell vehicles for less than their independent franchises.”21
In other words, the dealers want to protect the regulatory privileges that allow them to charge customers (us) more than is necessary. Tesla’s attempt to sell its cars directly over the internet (or through company-owned stores) broke the prison guards’ rules, so they’re trying to kill it.
You might have noticed that Uber actually operates a lot like the shared fleet of self-driving cars I described earlier—customers summoning the vehicles with their smartphones and being picked up a moment later. In fact, take away Uber’s drivers, add some sensors, and stuff a few computers in the trunk and you’ve pretty much got the model. And in Ron Linton and his taxi commission, the prison guards have their model too.
Stalling Out on Innovation
Once industry pioneers perfect the software for self-driving cars, which Sebastian Thrun estimates could happen within a couple of years, they will also have to get past the most imposing prison guard in the automotive industry: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA, pronounced “nit-suh”), which regulates cars, trucks, motorcycles, and anything else on the road. Every vehicle must obtain the NHTSA seal of approval before it can be sold to the public.
“Most people have no idea of all the aspects of the car that are controlled by federal regulation one way or another, and innovations that are stymied on cars for one reason or another,” says Robert Norton, a former assistant general counsel for Chrysler. Norton spent much of his career negotiating with NHTSA on behalf of the auto companies, including stints affiliated with each of the American Big Three. Most recently he was chief class action and vehicle regulatory counsel at Chrysler, a position that for seven years gave him a close-up view of how federal regulators kill innovation.
Consider the relatively small detail of a car’s headlights. “Headlights on cars were originally mandated to be round,” Norton told me. “When the industry wanted to make them square for a while, when that was in vogue, they had to go in and say, ‘Mother may I?’ and give NHTSA very specific details about exactly how the headlights would work.” Eventually permission was granted, but the agency continues to block advanced lighting technologies that would improve safety. The relevant bureaucrat inside NHTSA “has for a long time been affectionately referred to as ‘The Lighting Nazi,’” says Norton, for his fixed views about “the archaic laws and how it should be going forward.”
“Now—today as we’re sitting here—there are technologies available on cars in Europe that make lights safer. But the United States government does not recognize that technology yet, so the cars that are sold in the U.S. have to have the headlights that are made in Europe removed and have basically dumbed-down headlights put in for the American market.” Norton cites the example of Audi, which in Europe uses cameras automatically to dim individual LEDs in the headlight to avoid blinding other drivers while still illuminating the rest of the road and uses GPS to bend light around curves before the driver even turns the wheel. Volvos have a shutter that can automatically adjust to keep lights from blinding other drivers and open back up to full brightness when no cars are in view. “Our government is just not moving yet,” he says. “They’re holding back that innovation though it’s already out on the market.”
At one point in Norton’s career, a design team wanted to use clear LEDs on the rear of the vehicle that would change color as needed (for instance, red when you stepped on the brake pedal). The manufacturer argued that LEDs, which never burn out, would be safer for consumers. “At that time the government would really hear nothing of it,” Norton says. “NHTSA was absolutely refusing to let us have them.”
NHTSA enforces its will in large part through crash tests, which at first glance seem sensible. But those tests, complains Norton, are arbitrary and to a large extent meaningless. The front-impact 35-mph crash test presumes drivers are unbelted, even though seat-belt usage is approaching 90 percent in many states. It is a forty-year-old notion of how people ride in automobiles that has never been revised. Even the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety uses a side-impact test to rate crash-worthiness that “specifically is designed to imitate the front of a previously manufactured Ford F150 pickup truck,” which at that time represented the most popular vehicle of that size in the United States.
“It’s a little bit comical,” Norton says, “when you really know how these tests are done. If you don’t happen to get hit by a Ford F150 at that exact speed and angle, well, then all bets are off. Any scientist will tell you we have no predictor of how accurate this test is for, say, a Dodge truck, hitting you at 40 mph. What it really means for real-world safety, no one really comments too much about.”
In fact, the latest series of crash tests require crash dummy chest-deflection measurements that are more accurate than the calibration requirements of the dummies can even account for. For example, manufacturers are required to measure for only 15-20mm deflection in certain crashes, but the calibration of the dummy only gets as close as 75mm deflection. So the same test run with different dummies yields different results.
Like other federal bureaucracies, NHTSA’s power has expanded over the years, and now it pursues a muddled, often conflicting set of priorities that have dra
matically changed American cars, not always for the better. The agency “started off all about safety and then it drifted into fuel economy in the ’70s with the oil embargo, and then into emissions and greenhouse gases,” Norton observes. The irony is that the regulatory agency that was supposed to ensure passenger safety now demands that “we put people in very light-weight cars” to reduce emissions and increase fuel economy, “which means cars that we know are less safe. It’s funny how we’ve come full circle.”
This mission creep has left the prison guards with the power to control almost every aspect of Americans’ automobiles. NHTSA now sets so many rules and tests that there is only one way to meet them. All new cars on the road “pretty much start fitting in the same box,” Norton says. “You hear most of the lay people say, ‘Gee, they all look so much alike these days.’ Well, that’s why. They’re matching the government recipe.” The regulators have slowed automotive innovation to a crawl.
Asked if there was nothing the carmakers could do to get around the rules, Norton laughs, recalling Chrysler’s experience with its PT Cruiser, a smaller, fuel-efficient car with a retro design. It took a lot of finesse to get that retro design through the government regulations, he says, including one feature that the company wanted to include: tinted glass. “What Chrysler had to do was actually have the vehicle meet the government regulations that were intended for minivans, multi-purpose vehicles, in order to be able to put tinted glass in the side windows.” Minivans, apparently, are allowed to have tinted glass but passenger cars are not—a regulation that dates back to the 1960s. “So Chrysler beat the scheme and put out tinted windows in the PT Cruiser, and NHTSA was irritated about it,” he said. “They didn’t take it lying down. They caused us a lot of grief and aggravation.”
Auto companies don’t often dare to play games with the prison-guard regulators, however. When they can throw the rulebook at your core business, you don’t pick fights. “There’s so much soft power that NHTSA has over the industry,” Norton explains, “because you’re always needing extensions and exemptions and ‘Can I have sixty more days to give you this report?’ And generally you are expecting to get the ‘Mother-may-I’ permission on that.” But not always. At any time, he says, “if they get really irritated at you, they say, ‘No, actually you can’t. We want this now, and we’re not going to look at this, and we’re not going to consider that.’ So you really are encouraged to play ball because you’re counting on them for your existence.” Norton describes one occasion on which an automaker spent more than three years and several million dollars working with NHTSA on an issue it knew was never a problem before reaching a “compromise” to let the agency save face.
What about self-driving cars? How will the agency that blocks changes to headlights and tinted windows respond to computers that can drive two tons of machinery down the highway perfectly? “There’s a notion within the agency that because there is cyberterrorism that could take over the controls of your car and drive it into the concrete buffers, we probably shouldn’t have any more of these computers taking over for people,” Norton says. “I understand it’s not the temperament of the current regulators to want to go very far or very fast down that road.”
After all, if the computers could do it perfectly, there wouldn’t be much need for NHTSA, the prison guards of obsolete auto safety requirements.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BREAKOUT IN SPACE
In 1976, four years after Apollo astronauts had departed the moon for the last time, a Princeton University physicist named Gerard O’Neill published a manifesto called The High Frontier, a detailed vision of humanity’s near-term future in space. He imagined cylindrical space stations miles in diameter, with artificial gravity and landscapes like Southern California, complete with trees, lakes, and flowing streams. Thousands of people would live in traditional homes clustered in villages and towns. There’d be restaurants, movie theaters, playgrounds, and neighborhood barbeques. When space-dwellers sat “outside” on their decks and looked up at night, they’d see not stars but the sparkling lights of distant towns across the cylinder, hanging upside down from their perspective.
O’Neill was convinced that his designs could be commercially viable. His “islands” weren’t just vacation spots; they were primarily to be manufacturing hubs, with plenty of jobs for extraterrestrial expatriates. Residents could do manufacturing work that would be impossible on Earth, such as building extremely light structures or novel pharmaceuticals that require zero gravity to form. O’Neill also envisioned massive steam turbines designed to remain in space, powered by the sun twenty-four hours a day. The first space stations, he speculated, would be built by energy companies to generate low-cost electricity, which would be beamed back to Earth in the form of targeted microwaves. Other people on the islands would work in mass agricultural production, which would have extremely high yields at always-sunny points in space. A small local economy would grow around these primary industries, he predicted.
But how to build these gigantic cities in space? Men could mine the raw material at a base on the moon, O’Neill envisioned, after which they’d use what amounted to a huge magnetic cannon to launch it through the almost-nonexistent lunar atmosphere to construction sites somewhere between the earth and the moon.
O’Neill’s ideas were more than Star Trek–style science fiction. He, along with a substantial number of colleagues, produced detailed engineering plans to back up the concept. He demonstrated the feasibility of a number of the ideas in the real world, such as the “mass driver” he wanted to build on the moon. There was no theoretical reason why the stunning islands he described should not be possible, even profitable. And he thought it would all happen by 2010.
The High Frontier was an instant hit, exciting Americans about space for the first time since the Apollo missions. 60 Minutes covered O’Neill’s proposals, as did the New York Times. As Greg Klerkx writes in Lost in Space, “After the book’s publication, O’Neill became a media darling, appearing on talk shows, writing for newspapers and magazines and speaking before congressional hearings on the merits of space manufacturing, space solar power and space settlement. His allies included…California’s governor and presidential candidate Jerry Brown, and the powerful congressman Morris Udall, who was sufficiently impressed by the energy ramifications of O’Neill’s plans to lobby (albeit unsuccessfully) the Federal Energy Research and Development Administration to fund further design studies of O’Neillian concepts.… Even Carl Sagan became an O’Neill supporter.”1
To many Americans (including me), the O’Neill vision for America’s next act in space seemed a real possibility. After all, men had just walked on the moon in the same century as they had invented the airplane. And perhaps it was possible—as recently as the year 2000, the famed physicist Freeman Dyson predicted the concept could be viable by 2050.
Fast-forward thirty-seven years from O’Neill’s proposal, to 2013. The space shuttle, which was still on the drawing board when he published The High Frontier, is now literally a museum piece. The United States has no spacecraft capable of sending human beings into orbit. Since the shuttle retired more than two years ago, NASA has been forced to pay the Russians for seats on their Soyuz capsules (the earliest of which launched in 1967). The International Space Station is a timid and increasingly confused project with no clear mission, and NASA itself seems aimless, lacking a vision for the future.
Bureaucratizing Space
When in my presidential campaign I advocated a manned base on the moon—a goal I have supported for my entire career—many in the media and in my own party howled with laughter. Yet building a moon base had been official government policy through most of the Bush administration and for the first two years of Obama’s presidency, until he canceled the project in 2010 following ludicrous cost overruns in the early stages.
What happened? How did Americans go from being thrilled by the idea of thousands of people living and working in space, a country that celebrated vi
sions of O’Neill’s space islands on 60 Minutes, to scoffing at the idea of sending men back to the moon? The Chinese weren’t laughing. They were busily pursuing a moon shot of their own. What could be to blame for such a narrowing of imagination and increase in timidity in America?
The answer, quite simply, is NASA. The agency was once almost synonymous with the future, but in the four decades since the moon landings, it has become one of the government’s most tragic prison guards of the past.
In the past eleven years—since the Columbia disaster led President Bush to retire the space shuttle—we have spent roughly $150 billion on NASA and the civilian space program. We have spent additional money on defense aspects of a space program. Yet today the United States, on its own, cannot launch a single human being into space. NASA has accomplished some difficult feats in its history, but spending $150 billion on the space program without developing a rocket and spacecraft to launch astronauts into orbit is near the top of the list.
NASA has reached this point by achieving a perverse breakthrough: the bureaucratization of space. The modern NASA is so risk-averse and so heavily burdened with safety processes, management, political meddling, and institutional inertia that it takes decades for new programs to get off the ground.
Only seven years and five months passed between John Glenn’s Mercury 6 mission in February 1962 (when he became the first American to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing in July 1969. In that time we figured out how to perform frequent launches, keep men alive in space for weeks, conduct spacewalks, rendezvous and dock two spacecraft in orbit, travel to the moon, land on it, walk around the lunar surface, launch from the moon, and return to Earth. Each of these achievements presented innumerable challenges, all of which were overcome in well under a decade.
Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate Page 14
