Levelling Up to Driverless Cars
by Susan Kuchinskas, Automotive -www.tu-auto.com
It’s very clear now that automakers are taking an iterative approach to autonomous driving:
gradually improving the capabilities of their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) year after year while fusing them together both technically and via product names. BMW and Mercedes-Benz have semi-autonomous offerings on the market, and seven other OEMs are on track to have highly automated systems that include traffic jam assist and automated highway driving by 2020, according to Frost & Sullivan.
No one really wants to use the A-word, that is, “autonomous.” Ask the folks who are plotting their road maps when we’ll be able to fall asleep and let the car take us where we’re going, and they respond, “Never–except maybe for niche situations.” They’re much more comfortable with the current “levels” concept–even though they don’t always agree on which level is which.
Automakers are still trying to figure out what autonomous means in the near future, at the five-year and ten-year marks,” says Kumar Krishnamurthy, a partner in the IT practice of Strategy &. Some automakers are moving to driverless cars driven by external pressures such as the hype around Google’s well-publicized work on self-driving cars. Others, he says, are taking more targeted approaches, focusing on one thing at a time, such as automatic parking. And at least one auto maker he’s talked to is betting that drivers will always want to drive. “Where those strategies are going to land is unclear,” he says.
General Motors’ Super Cruise will be introduced in one 2017 Cadillac model, and GM is a case in point for the iterative introduction process.”We’re doing Super Cruise as a big step toward autonomous driving,” says John Capp, director of global safety strategy for product engineering at General Motors. The foundation was the driversafety package that’s now almost standard in all Cadillacs. Capp says that Super Cruise builds on some of the sensors, radars and cameras by letting them communicate with each other. “It’s a realistic next step….. Read the article
DCL: This is an excellent article on the development of Self-drive cars. To my mind the one thing it does not deal with is the transition period when there is a mix of self-drive and non-self-drive vehicles on the road. A recipe for chaos!
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