Who’s driving your car? Autonomous driving: closer than you imagine

Mercedes F015 concept car – designed from the outset for autonomous operation

WHO’S DRIVING YOUR CAR?

In the global auto industry the big new concept is autonomous driving and the first cars able to partially drive themselves are not far off. Tony Lewin reports.

Like any other global business, the motor industry is prone to changes in mood and shifts in focus. After the doom and gloom of the 2008 crisis and the Chapter 11 collapse of General Motors and Chrysler there was a brief flurry of interest in electric cars; after that, crossovers and plug-in hybrids became the focus and, with the US market picking up and the European slide showing signs of having bottomed out, faster and more powerful models began to be seen as respectable again – especially as a source of much-needed profits.

But while those recent trends may paint a somewhat confusing picture, there can be no doubt whatsoever as to what has been gripping the newly resurgent car business over the past 12 months. Wherever you go, whoever you speak to, the most excited and the most bullish talk is about autonomous driving – vehicles which, to a greater or lesser extent, guide themselves on certain types of journey and which could in theory leave the driver to relax with a newspaper, work through a full inbox of emails, or simply sit back and enjoy the ride.

In truth, the speed and intensity of all the announcements has rather taken the industry by surprise. Developments in driverless vehicles – or autonomous cars, autopiloted cars, piloted drive, depending on who you are listening to – had been bubbling under for several years, with a handful of cumbersome research vehicles and many caveats about legal liability and infrastructure compatibility. It was only a year ago that Renault-Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn declared his group would be marketing a self-driving car by 2020, and later that year that the Google driverless prototype made its much-publicised debut on the internet giant’s California campus. These were the two real wake-up calls, and since then the declarations and the predictions have been coming thick and fast.

As a slight aside, the fact that the Google name is now cropping up in an automotive context is an immensely significant one: it is a sign of an imminent and far-reaching shift in who does what and who gets the fattest returns in the auto business. Electronics giants Apple, Sony and Nokia are also keen for a slice of the action and to see their electronic software embedded in vehicle communications installations encompassing entertainment, navigation and, sooner than most people expect, vehicle guidance and control.

The shift in emphasis towards electronics has meant a parallel change of focus for several leading automakers. January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year upstaged the globally famous Detroit auto show two weeks later by hosting several key automotive debuts, most notably the unveiling of Mercedes-Benz’s dramatically futuristic autonomous driving F015 concept car; likewise, Carlos Ghosn chose

the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, just a week before Geneva’s prestigious annual Salon de l’Automobile in March, to deliver his timetable for the introduction of autonomous driving technologies on upcoming Renault and Nissan models.

Coming from the CEO of one of the principal companies making the running, Ghosn’s words were carefully heeded by the whole industry and serve as a convenient benchmark against which to measure the progress being made by other runners in the field. The first stage, Ghosn declared, will come in 2016, with a feature that will allow cars to negotiate stop-and-go traffic without direct driver intervention.

The second wave, in 2018, will include cars able to drive themselves on the highway, including changing lanes. The third wave will feature technology that permits the car to handle more complex city driving autonomously. In all these cases, Ghosn stressed, the driver will remain in control at the wheel and have the option to use the technology when appropriate. High-end Renault and Nissan cars would be the first to feature this technology, he noted.

Measuring up

So, where are we now on Ghosn’s scale? Many cars, even cheaper ones, already come fully fitted with smartphone connectivity, allowing music, phone and navigation functions to be conducted hands free; some already function as wi-fi hotspots, while several brands include eCall – automated emergency calling in the event of an accident to get the assistance to the scene more quickly. These could be described as static functions: for some years many brands have also offered active functions such as lane-keeping, traffic sign recognition and radar-based intelligent speed-adapting cruise control to maintain safe distances on motorways. Most medium and large models offer automatic collision-mitigation braking too, if the driver fails to heed warnings of an impending hazard, and the Volvo-pioneered city braking for the protection of pedestrians, cyclists (and no-claims bonuses) is becoming popular even on the smallest models thanks to the bonus points it now provides in Euro NCAP’s safety ratings. Programmed parking is commonplace too.

Many of the above features are important building-brick technologies underpinning Ghosn’s first stage of the autonomous driving timetable; rather fewer makers have yet begun to offer so-called follow-to-stop cruise control, which would qualify as the full level one capability. Principally expounded by Mercedes on its S-Class, even this relatively limited capability requires a host of short and medium distance sensors, cameras and electronic intervention in the accelerator, brakes and, to a limited extent, steering.

No one has yet reached stage two with a production model, though a prototype Audi successfully navigated itself from California’s silicon valley to Las Vegas in time for a well publicised arrival at the Consumer Electronics Show, and a research vehicle built by electronics supplier Delphi completed a 3400-mile coast-to-coast trip to New York in ‘hands-off’ mode for 99 per cent of the time. Along the way, said Delphi, the vehicle encountered complex driving situations such as traffic circles, construction zones, bridges, tunnels, aggressive drivers and a variety of weather conditions.

Wall Street hero and CEO of electric car maker Tesla, Elon Musk, recently stated that his company’s Model S sedans were all technically capable of autonomous operation but that this capability would not be activated until road conditions and infrastructure provisions made it safe to do so.

US legislation, to date much the most liberal when it comes to the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, still requires the presence of conventional steering wheel and pedal controls, as well as a human driver ready to intervene should things go wrong. No such rules applied in two other defining self-driving moments: when Audi’s potent A7 lapped the Hockenheim grand

prix circuit at racing speeds with no one aboard, and when Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche stepped out of the back seat of a Mercedes S-Class that had just brought him onto the company’s stand at the Frankfurt motor show – again with no one driving.

Challenges ahead

Ghosn’s third stage, that of handling complex city-centre driving without driver intervention, will be much more challenging on every level and few automakers have dared set a timetable for this. Volvo is especially cautious, having revealed its Autopilot field trial for blending in 100 autonomous cars in with everyday traffic on selected Swedish roads. “It is relatively easy to build and demonstrate a self-driving concept vehicle, but if you want to create an impact in the real world, you have to design and produce a complete system that will be safe, robust and affordable for ordinary customers,” says Dr Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo Cars. The main challenge is to design an Autopilot that is robust for traffic scenarios as well as for technical faults that may occur, says Volvo. It cannot be expected that the driver is ready to suddenly intervene in a critical situation. Initially, the cars will drive autonomously on selected roads with suitable conditions, for example without oncoming traffic, cyclists and pedestrians.

“Making this complex system 99 per cent reliable is not good enough. You need to get much closer to 100 per cent before you can let self-driving cars mix with other road users in real-life traffic,” adds Coelingh. “Here, we have a similar approach to that of the aircraft industry. Our fail-operational architecture includes backup systems that will ensure that Autopilot will continue to function safely also if an element of the system were to become disabled. For example, the probability of a brake system failure is very small, but a selfdriving vehicle needs a second independent system to brake the vehicle to a stop, as it is unlikely that the driver will be prepared to press the brake pedal.”

Set against this backdrop, Audi’s demonstration of an A7 racing around the Hockenheimring was comparatively straightforward: the environment was a precisely mapped and carefully controlled one, GPS triangulation kept the car’s position and speed at the exact computed safe values, there were no unpredictable pedestrians, cyclists or oncoming traffic, and the likelihood of hackers, jammers or electromagnetic interference spoiling the show was next to zero.

Proof of concept

The F015 concept car, revealed by Mercedes at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and demonstrated to the media in San Francisco in March, is the first vehicle to have been designed from scratch to operate autonomously, though conventional controls can be called upon if the driver so desires. The four occupants sit facing each other in individual swivel chairs in the huge interior space: the front seats swivel to face the direction of travel if manual driving mode is selected. Other capabilities of the design build on the same technologies already available on the S500 Intelligent Drive – a whole suite of systems to accelerate and brake the car, keep it in lane, help it avoid collisions and brake for crossing traffic at junctions.

Fully automated cars like the F015 are many years away, concedes even Mercedes, and numerous technical and legal hurdles must be overcome before their use on public roads becomes possible. Yet the likely benefits are considerable: Mercedes anticipates much lower energy consumption, and in Europe the introduction of elements of an intelligent traffic infrastructure is expected to reduce road fatalities by 30 per cent and cut congestion by 15 per cent by 2020.

Ironically, too, the higher the proportion of autonomously guided vehicles on the road, the lower the share of erratic human-driven models there will be, making travel safer still.

Far-sighted automakers such as Volkswagen and Daimler are buddying up with the electronics community in the safe expectation that it will be software as much as petrol, diesel, hydrogen or electricity that makes cars move, and that as much power will reside in the central control networks as in the vehicles themselves.

The historic shift already seems to be underway and, spurred on by Ghosn’s timely comments, the auto industry is set to shed its old-fashioned metal-bashing image and adopt the allure of a slick, silicon valley operator. The ramifications of wholesale automation of traffic, whether just on motorways or also in well-disciplined city centres, are immense – not only for the automobile designers and the highway builders, but also for the car occupants. And there will be new commercial considerations too, not least of which will be the challenge for manufacturers keen to retain customer loyalty to find ways of building a convincing brand experience within a vehicle that the customer may never even drive. n

Delphi’s automated car arrives in New York in the first hands-off coast-to-coast drive