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Ready or not, driverless cars are coming

Image of Craig Thomas
Author: | Updated: 02 Apr 2015 16:29

Cars, by and large, remained relatively unchanged for much of the 20th Century. Yes, they became faster and more powerful as the decades flew by in a cloud of exhaust fumes, and safety and comfort incrementally improved, but essentially, the same combustion-engined cars ended the century as they began it.

The first half of the 21st Century, however, will see fundamental changes to how human beings and cars interact. We’re already seeing how the emergence of the connected car will change our in-car experience, something that will accelerate in the next four or five years, but an even more revolutionary step is on the horizon.

Get ready for the self-driving car.

Driverless Audi A7

The naysayers will suggest self-driving cars take away one of our fundamental freedoms. Or they’ll object that they will take away yet another of life’s little pleasures. Some will even rail against the encroachment of the ‘nanny state’.

But the reality is, letting a vehicle do the driving for us could potentially improve the quality of our lives immeasurably.

Take road safety, for example. World Health Organization statistics show that road traffic injuries account for 1.24 million casualties every year, or nearly 3,400 people dying every day. The WHO estimates that by 2030, it’s going to get even worse, with road traffic deaths becoming the fifth leading cause of death by 2030. In addition, up to 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability as a result of their injury.

Studies on road collisions – and they are collisions, not ‘accidents’ – point to the fact that 90-95% are caused by human error. Indeed the most common cause is drivers not seeing other vehicles (otherwise known as Smidsy – ‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you’). If we’re to blame for most of the road deaths, perhaps a radical solution such as taking the responsibility for driving out of the hands of fallible humans might be just what we need.

Then there’s the number of cars that we’re buying. Global new car registrations are on target to set a new record in 2014, growing to 78.3m units. Compare that to the 2005 global sales of 45.2m private cars and it’s easy to see why our roads are becoming increasingly congested.

Traffic congestion

At the same time, the world's population is becoming increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas, with the number of megacities on the rise (the UN estimates that by 2050, 50% of us will be living in cities). We're all living on top of one another, but at the same time we all still want to retain some sort of personal mobility - which, of course, clogs up the roads of our cities.

Factor in the need to find some way to develop more efficient and sustainable cars, with more environmentally friendly propulsion systems, and it's clear that something needs to be done.

In many ways, self-driving cars are a logical progression of the capabilities automobiles have been developing over the last couple of decades. The concept still seems a little sci-fi, even now, but the reality is that many of the features required to make the self-driving car a reality are already in the cars we drive.

For example, with adaptive cruise control (ACC) you pre-set a speed that you want to drive at. If the radar system embedded in the nose of the car detects traffic slowing ahead, the system automatically reduces your speed to match, until it’s able to accelerate again to the pre-set speed.

Then there’s lane assist technology, which not only detects that your car is veering into another lane, but also steers the car so it’s back on track; blind spot detection, which uses cameras to spot cars in your blind spot and alerts to their presence by illuminating a light next to your rear-view mirror; and even park assist technology that can identify a parking spot big enough to fit your car and steer it in, with the driver only required to change gear into reverse and apply some throttle.

Driverless parking

The building blocks – the software systems, the cameras and radar sensors – are therefore already in existence and fitted to an increasing number of models. The next step is to connect them all together and allow them to take control of a car on the public highway.

It’s quite a step to take, though. Think of all the practicalities of a self-driving car in among the mass of cars driven by us mere human drivers, with our unpredictable behaviour and tendencies to become distracted by the car’s other occupants or mobile phones.

Then there are the legal questions about who’s responsible if something does happen, plus the insurance implications. It’s a tangled web that carmakers, with the natural caution of multinational corporations that have brands to protect, are reluctant to jump into, feet first.

There are, however, a number of autonomous car projects that are starting to provide real data to help us answer the many questions we naturally have.

Google – a tech giant that arguably has the ability to steal a march on more traditional carmakers – hit the headlines with its autonomous car last year. It’s one solution, possibly, but by not replicating a conventional-looking car that we drivers can relate to, it does perhaps take too big a step.

The same is true for some of the projects currently being tested in the UK, including the large golf cart-like Meridian shuttle in Greenwich and self-drive pods in Milton Keynes.

Driverless pod

However, one major manufacturer will have self-driving versions of recognisable cars on the road in two years’ time.

Volvo will undertake a self-driving car project, called Drive Me, on the streets of Gothenburg, giving 100 Volvo customers cars with self-driving capability for two years.

Using cameras, radar, lasers, map data and GPS, a connection to the cloud and a dedicated traffic control centre, the 100 drivers will be able to commute, or drive for business or leisure purposes in these cars, with the ability to switch them into autonomous mode on a 50km stretch of road around the city, at speed of up to 70kph.

The project is designed to not only test the technology in a real-world setting, but also to try and understand how autonomous driving will have an impact of society, what infrastructure changes autonomous driving will require, what real-world situations would create difficulties for self-driving cars and highlight how car consumers could benefit from handing control of driving over to the vehicle.

With driver distraction likely to become a hot topic over the coming years, as connected cars potentially give us more opportunities to spend less of our concentration on driving, and a new generation of ‘digital natives’ being more willing to see driving as the distraction, rather than the devices that are central to their lives (their smartphones, tablets and whatever the likes of Apple and Samsung will develop in the next decade), self-driving cars could offer the solution.

And they’re not that far away: they could be in showrooms by 2025 for the early adopters and in all our garages and driveways within 30 years, making fatal collisions a thing of the past, easing congestion and allowing us all to take more control of more of our lives.

Those are all changes that are hard to argue against.

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