English | EN The Latest on Self-Driving Cars
Aug 5, 2014
Experts at the Automotive Engineers World Congress last year predicted self-driving cars wouldn’t be seen in showrooms until at least 2025. Just five months later, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said that he envisioned self-driving cars in showrooms five years earlier than that, in 2020. Now Mr Ghosn has revised his original prediction to 2018 – around four years from now – while speaking at a French Automobile Club event. “The problem isn’t technology, it’s legislation and the whole question of responsibility that goes with these cars moving around”
Give Google three years
Google says their new “Googly” cars should be road-ready by early next year, but that testing would take more than two years. At that point the technology will be ready for the next stage, which is likely to be greater pilot testing.
Mercedes Self Driving truck
In June this year Mercedes-Benz has claimed a world-first, completing a 100 km journey with a fully autonomous version of its new S-Class sedan. And now Mercedes Benz is heading for 2025 to introduce the world’s first self driving truck (their claim). It is based on intelligent networking of all the safety systems already available, plus cameras, radar sensors and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Daimler has more doubts about the legal framework (Like Renault-Nissan) to allow the trucks, then on the technology.
During a media demonstration in Germany, the manned but self-driven Benz Actros travelled along a controlled section of the A14 Autobahn unaided at a steady 80 to 85km/h.
More good news, surprisingly coming from legal
Autonomous cars may arrive sooner than expected, following a small but significant change to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic, followed by 72 countries. Article 8 of the 1968 Convention on Road Traffic previously said: “Every driver shall at all times be able to control his vehicle or to guide his animals”.
The new rule says that drivers of fully- or highly-autonomous cars would be permitted to remove their hands from the steering wheel, provided the system “can be overridden or switched off by the driver.”
A driver license for Autonomous cars
April this year Washington DC changed their driver licenses. The “A ” stands for Autonomous in your driver license. Funny if you think about it, a driverless car driver license.
People are ready, discount on insurance counts
A survey in the US has found while drivers are ‘ready’ for self-driving cars. Just over 22 percent of respondents said they were ‘very likely’ to buy an autonomous car, but 24.5 percent said they ‘never’ would. Asked whether an insurance discount of 80 percent would change their mind, those figures change to 37.6 percent for ‘very likely’, and 13.7 percent for ‘never’. The organisation that did the survey is insurance.com and they say that an insurance discount of 80 percent is not beyond the realms of possibility, as Insurance.com claims 95 percent of collisions are caused by human error. Funny to read that despite that claim, 61 percent of respondents believed they could make better decisions than the self-driving computer.
If 90% of all cars wher self driving…
Another study, done by the Eno Centre for Transportation, found 4.2 million fewer collisions, 21,700 lives saved and $450 billion in economic benefits if 90 percent of cars on the road were autonomous. Here the basics on which they made their calculations.
But what if terrorist hack the system?
An internal report with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US is believed to have identified self-driving cars as a potential weapon for terrorists. Smarter criminals may override pre-programed safety features to enable their self-driven car to ignore traffic signals such as red lights, knowing every other autonomous car on the road will take action automatically to avoid a collision. More extreme cases could see a car packed with explosives, before it drives itself to a target area and detonates. A car with no driver would attract much attention today, but as future autonomous cars drive around city centres looking for parking spaces while empty, the lead-up to a future attack of this nature would likely go unnoticed. The FBI reportedly believes autonomous cars could be approved for use on public roads in the US within five to seven years.
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