Imagine a night on the town without having to recruit a designated driver. Imagine being on an amourous date with no need to worry about the driving. Imagine shared ownership of an auto-piloted vehicle with the suburban neighbours for the commute downtown. Imagine ordering up a car with a click on your smartphone, delivered to your door within minutes. Imagine prepping for the big meeting in the back seat, the monitor built into a side panel connecting you to a video conference while the laptop pulls up the Power Point.
It's all possible with a chauffeur today; in future, auto makers are telling us, autonomous vehicles will port people from place to place without requiring anyone to get behind the wheel. McKinsey and Company says up to 50 minutes per day will be freed up fior drivers, parking space will be reduced by billions of square metres, vehicle crashes will decrease by 90 per cent. Presently, however, it is a matter of imagination. Rosy declarations of fully autonomous vehicles on our roads by 2030 are being dampened by cautionary messages.
Toyota has committed $1-billion (U.S.) to the newly formed Toyota Research Institute to take on the challenges ahead of creating a truly safe, completely autonomous vehicle. The institute will work in association with M.I.T. and Stanford universities.
"Most of what has been accomplished is relatively easy," said Gill Pratt, CEO of the institute. "The reason it is easy, is because most of our driving is easy. Where we need help is when driving is hard, when it's difficult."
The automotive industry is pressing ahead with autonomous vehicles, in part because companies envision ride-sharing as a solution to big-city congestion. Visitors to the Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto will be informed about the baby steps already integrated into "semi-autonomous" cars, with features such as lane departure warning systems, adaptive cruise control, lane-keep assist, blind-spot detection, forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking, and self-parking.
The Consumer Technology Association predicted one million fully autonomous vehicles to be in production by 2030. At the CES conference in January, Kia vice-president Seung Ho Hwang pledged $2-billion "to bring the fully autonomous driving technology to the market," by 2030.
"It's crazy. There's a lot of work to do," said M.I.T. professor Russ Tedrake, who will adapt his ongoing development of robotics to the Toyota project. "What Gill said, and what some of these others won't say, is that things don't always work. What we're seeing out there is best-cases."
A Hyundai demonstration shows vehicles behind a transport truck responding automatically when the truck brakes. There are no collisions. Hyundai conducted the experiment on a sun-baked road in the California desert. On a snow-coated mountain road in British Columbia, carnage would result.
At Level 4, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the driver is hands-off in certain environments, including highways and cities equipped with the technologies to communicate with the cars. At the holy grail, Level 5, the cars would be able to drive themselves, anywhere, in any condition. Offering but one example of the challenges in front of that goal, M.I.T.'s Tedrake says a car computer would have to adjust constantly, in milliseconds, to the angle of the sun's light reflecting off roadside snow. CEO Mark Fields says Fordhas reached Level 3 with its autonomous vehicle testing and began testing in snow.
Still, Tedrake, interviewed at CES, said, "There's an energy here about autonomous driving. People are excited now, and when they get excited, it's going to happen. Does that mean it's going to happen by 2030? There's no way to know."
Meantime, auto makers are dazzling consumers with visions of the future, while pouring billions of dollars in research and technologies.
Mercedes-Benz got the ball rolling with a splash at CES2015, revealing a fully electric F105 Luxury in Motion concept car, without windows. Pixel Stream would project images into the car's interior, and passengers would enjoy the ambience of a luxury lounge in the rear cabin, amidst an interior of grainy walnut, glass, white nappa leather and aluminium.
"Piloted driving" technology in the fourth-generation Audi A8 will go from stop to 60 km/h, park itself, and move at highway speeds for short distances before alerting the driver to take the wheel. While the technology enabling these feats is in use now – an A3 e-tron is available for test drives at the Toronto show – at CES2016, Audi explained that in future, the "Central Driver Assistance System" will assimilate new and prior information from a laser scanner to build a model of the car's surroundings, and return the model to the computer to control the driving in a crowded city and highway bumper-to-bumper conditions. Using a smartphone app, the owner will also be able to order the car to park itself.
Volvo plans to test the Concept 26 in 2017 and announced at CES that it is working with Ericsson to develop HD streaming for self-driven vehicles. GM invested $500-million in Lyft with the notion of building driverless cars, including the hybrid Volt. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said the company will have 10 models on the road by 2020 with autonomous capabilities.
Also at CES, BMW's i8 sports car had front seats angled toward one another by 15 degrees, the idea being to facilitate conversation between driver and passenger as the car drives itself. Sensors in the dashboard and touchscreen allows the controls to be managed with a simple wave of the hand, a feature BMW has dubbed AirTouch. The latter feature is available now, in the Series 7.
Volve surveyed customers and found the vast majority will want the ability to operate the cars themselves. Porsche agrees completely. Said CEO Oliver Blume last week: "An iPhone belongs in your pocket, not on the road."
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