Cars driving themselves into the future

However in the past few weeks we have seen major announcements come out from Ford and Volvo. Every car company it seems is chasing the dream of cars that drive themselves and the dream is much closer to becoming reality than it was just a year ago, in spite of concerns arising around safety after incidents such as that involving a Tesla.

Ever-changing tech

We all know that technology moves at a rapid pace. Buy a smartphone or a laptop today and tomorrow it is out of date. In the automotive world, engine technology is advancing quickly, but it is inside the car that the changes are harder to keep up with. A car company can launch a new flagship today packed with the latest tech and within months it is marketing a lower model with not just the same tech, but even more.

Car companies are turning into information technology companies, either through their own tech departments or through partnerships and acquisitions. The pace of change is relentless and every time an automaker reveals a new piece of tech the management team is looking nervously around to see if it is going to be beaten by something better a day later.

The road of change is moving fastest when it comes to autonomous driving. Ford is promising to have self-driving cars as part of a car-sharing and ride-hailing scheme at the beginning of the next decade. The Renault-Nissan Alliance says it will have 10 autonomous vehicles by the end of this decade.

Volvo is another company that has been working on self-driving cars for the past few years, testing in Sweden and in China. It has been making lots of noise about its valet parking system which is under development. The system will allow you to climb out of your car and the car will go off to a quiet corner of a car park and wait until you summon it back to pick you up.

Of course we do already have autonomous driving in many of the cars we use, but it is basic compared to the full self-driving car. Adaptive cruise control where the car maintains a distance to the car ahead is one example. Another is lane-keeping assist, such as that in models like the Mercedes E-Class and others where the car can follow the lane markings and keep you in your lane.

Some systems can even drive the car through bends. Park assistance allows a car to park itself into a parallel or alley dock parking space, although it can be a bit of a hit (hopefully not) or miss affair sometimes. BMW has taken this a step further with the ability to park your 7 Series into a space or your garage at the touch of the smart key, without even being in the car. Land Rover will have the same in the next generation of the Discovery.

Autonomous fleets

One of the biggest announcements was from Volvo and Uber. The two companies have joined forces and invested around 300m to create a driverless vehicle which can be used in carsharing and ride-hailing applications. Volvo will design and build the car and then add in its own autonomous tech.

Uber will buy the car from Volvo and do the same. Uber has been working on autonomous technology for the past couple of years. It proudly announced it would launch a trial of self-driving taxis in July, but that has been delayed. Meanwhile, Uber's thunder has been stolen by a company called Nutonomy. Essentially a software firm that develops the systems for self-driving cars, Nutonomy has launched a trial of a self-driving taxi service in Singapore, beating every major automaker to this milestone.

Currently the trial is restricted to one district of Singapore, where a person can hail a self-driving Mitsubishi i-Miev or Renault Zoe through an app, the same as with Uber. The car will drive itself to the pick-up and on to the customer's destination. Being a public trial, an engineer still has to be in the car in order to monitor the vehicle and collect data, but the engineer will not be in control of the vehicle.

"Nutonomy's first in the world public trial is a direct reflection of the level of maturity that we have achieved with our autonomous vehicle software system," says Karl Iagnemma, CEO and co-founder of the company. "The trial represents an extraordinary opportunity to collect feedback from riders in a real-world setting, and this feedback will give Nutonomy a unique advantage as we work toward deployment of a self-driving vehicle fleet in 2018."

Suddenly every major automaker is looking towards Singapore to see how well this trial works. Given that Iagnemma is promising a self-driving vehicle fleet in 2018, a number of years before the main car companies, we can expect engineers in Detroit, Gothenburg, Stuttgart and Ingolstadt to be burning the midnight oil to beat this new target date.

A year ago we were predicting autonomous cars by 2025. It looks as though they are driving themselves into our future faster than we expected.

Source: Business Day