Autonomous cars
Our Editor, Shane O’ Donoghue, wonders just how far away truly autonomous cars are
driverless? Is the future The autonomous driving experience by Mercedes-Benz T
he mainstream media loves to talk about driverless or autonomous cars. If you believed the hype, you’d be forgiven
for thinking that it’ll only be a few months before you can go for a few pints and have the car drive you home in perfect safety, or let the car do the school run, or let the car do the monotonous Dublin to Cork motorway driving while you have a snooze. All those things might happen someday, but my prediction is that it won’t be for many decades, possibly not even in my lifetime. I know that makes me sound like a
Luddite, but in fact I love technology, and though I’ll admit to being not too happy about a future where people who enjoy driving (i.e. me) have to do it in certain designated areas only, I’m also realistic enough to realise the massive benefi ts that
An Audi A7 drives us along a German Autobahn
fully autonomous driving will bring. And I don’t mean a rejuvenation of rural pub culture… Think about it: once the technology is fully mature, driverless cars will have far far fewer accidents than human-driven ones, they’ll be able to drive in formation to use the road more effi ciently, autonomously use the least congested route to any given destination, allow their occupants to be productive or relax as needs be, remove the risk of sleepy/drink/drug driving from our roads and, here’s an interesting one: completely democratise mobility. You won’t need a driving licence or the ability to drive, so those that are limited now by age, physical disability or anything else, will have access to the same point-to-point transport as the rest of us. And yet, I think we’re an age away from that being a reality. That isn’t pure conjecture
Google tests driverless tech
on my behalf, either. Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to meet engineers from around the world working for many diff erent car makers on autonomous driving technology. I’ve been driven fl at-out around a race track by a computer-controlled Audi; I’ve chatted about what’s coming with futurologists from Mercedes-Benz while their prototype drove us up and down a runway near San Francisco; and I’ve even sat in a BMW on a busy three-lane German motorway with my hands on my lap while the car executed a perfectly smooth and safe lane change and dealt with stop-start traffi c without my intervention. So what’s the delay? Well, these were all
closely controlled environments and even the forward thinking engineers admit that they cannot yet predict when fully autonomous cars, ready to deal with any road situation in any country will exist. If you soak up the hype from Tesla and Google’s new Waymo company, you might dismiss such a comment, but you can’t believe everything you read. AI
10 Auto Ireland 2017
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