Autonomous Driving. Why is taking so long?
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What is it?
An autonmous car is a vehicle that can ride, feel the environment around and operate without human “help”. This term: “Autonomous car” is the highest level of driving automation. The Society of Automotive Engineers helped us defining the levels of driving automation.
How it works:
It wasn’t now that self-driving cars have been developed and improved. The main idea is very simple: A car surrounded by sensors and cameras that tracks everything around it and gets ready to take an action when necessary. These cars are also equipped with computer and artificial intelligence with traffic rules to a better navigation and ride by their own.
But behind this description comes a lot of complexity. The simple action of drive possible is one of the more complicated activities a person can do every day. Just follow the road rules and the GPS guide is not enough. Around the car is happening many things that a driver needs to take care.
What are the challenges and why is taking so long to see this cars on the road?
The main idea of an autonomous car is not new, this concept has been developed for decades, but why this cars are not popular yet?
This whole idea has some challenges that brakes this popularization and evolution. The challenges can be technological, environmental and principally legislative. Let´s take a look in some of them:
- Weather conditions:
What happens if a self-driving car is on the road and starts a heavy rain? Or if is snowing and the line dividers or other ground signalization disappear. How will the hundreds of sensors and cameras identify where the car need to stay or track another lane marking, if is impossible to see?
- Traffic conditions:
Will an autonomous car have troubles when in bridges or tunnels(with no internet signal or difficulty vision)? How they will make it in heavy traffic or in an unexpected situation? Will those cars have a specific lane? Those are just some doubts in this subject.
- Accidents:
If an autonomous car get involved in an accident, who is the liable? The human passenger? Some of the projects suggests that a fully autonomous car will not have a steering wheel, so there´s no way the human inside take control to avoid an accident.
- Artificial Intelligence?
The main technology behind an autonomous car is the artifical intelligence. And the 2010s were a great decade for AI. With small research it is possible to see big advances like speech generation, computer vision and object recognition.
But when it came to this topic, the limitations became very apparent. Even the giant amount of time, money and effort invested can´t solve the problem: navigate with the reliability necessary.
Human drivers rely on subtle and non-verbal communication, eye contact with pedestrians and read facial expressions of other drivers to predict behaviors. Those problems need lots and lots of data and training, maybe billions of hours of human real driving to teach a computer.
My opinion about this is that the biggest difficult is to collect this amount of data. No one can solve this because it´s impossible to think all possible scenarios in thousands of different situations.
The progress is slow but they are getting closer. Each company uses a different method like training cars is simulations and engineering specific situations to get more data about.
Why they are doing this?
After all, why all this research, work and money investment is good for us? There is many reasons to believe that autonomous cars are a good investment. For example, they will make easier the experience of drive for older people or those with disabilities who can´t drive safely. They will provide a better and cheaper option for who can´t own a car to move around the city. And there are some people who argued that will be good for the environment because it will reduce the number of cars and car trips, making own a car unnecessary, creating a society model where is just call one when they need one.
Additional researches and development will make the cars safer, probably safer then human-driven. And, of course, this market will be a gold mine for the first company that make a commercial autonomous car.
It’s very common for new technologies to be dangerous, complicated and a little scary in its first years of development, but with new discoveries and tests everything will be refined into a valuable product and safe to use. Think about the difference of the beginning of the first airplanes and now.
When can we buy a self-driving car?
This is a difficult thing to answer. Some new companies believe we are close, like Waymo is running tests without drivers since 2017 and Cruise delayed the 2019 launch of their autonomous taxi service. Tesla’s autopilot — which is already implemented in your cars — is updated frequently to improve the auto-driving experience, but still not a completely autonomous experience.
By the other hand, the CEO of one of the biggest car companies Volkswagen said that a completely self-driving car might never happen considering the progress made till now.
Autonomous car are improved every year, becoming closer then ever. But no one can tell us when they be available to us.
