Vehicles of the future

With almost every major automotive company joining the race to bring the first driverless car to market, and autonomous public transport solutions being tested throughout the world, governing bodies are working to put legislation in place to meet the challenges of this transport revolution. Industry Europe looks at some of the most recent developments in this sector.

There is no stopping the rise of autonomous driving technology: it is only a matter of time before the technological infrastructure is in place to ensure driverless vehicles can navigate our road networks safely. European players such as BMW, Volvo and Daimler are all working on their own projects, not to mention global producers such as Nissan and Ford. We are also seeing collaborations between vehicle manufacturers and software companies, such as that between Uber and Swedenbased Volvo, involving a pilot project for self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, US, as part of the world’s first automated taxi service. But it is not just the automotive companies that are jumping on board – Google has famously been working on its own autonomous vehicle since 2009.

And there are certainly plenty of incentives to push forward driverless vehicles. It has been estimated that around 94 per cent of crashes are due to human error; eliminate this, so the theory goes, and you greatly reduce fatalities. Furthermore, the UK’s Department for Transport believes driverless cars will allow people to be more mobile and productive on their commutes, as well as cutting emissions and reducing traffic congestion.

Legislative challenges

But on the flip side of the coin, there are still many challenges to be addressed. The need for targeted Europe-wide – and indeed global – legislation is one of the biggest hurdles to be faced before we see autonomous vehicles on our roads. For example, negotiations on a UN regulation that keeps driverless cars from going faster than 10km per hour won’t be concluded until the second half of 2017.

Moreover, all the new European vehicles in development – whether it is Finland’s Easymile EZ-10 bus or BMW’s iVision Future Interaction concept car – will rely on advanced connectivity. How cars exchange data with manufacturers, traffic controllers, emergency services and other road users is just as important as the functioning of the vehicle itself: a car may be autonomous, but it cannot function in isolation. Another issue is that driverless transit will require higher, steadier Internet speeds than are currently available within the EU. According to Ismail Ertug, a member of the European Parliament from the Socialist and Democrats Group: “In order to keep pace in

Volvo and Uber collaborate on driverless cars

view of these rapid developments and to stay competitive vis à vis other regions around the world, the European Commission will have to swiftly respond.” The EU is currently aiming for speeds of around 100 mbps by 2025. Countries with slower data connections will need to be brought up to the same level, as cars driving from country to country will rely on a steady Internet connection to transfer information with sensors on the road and other cars. This in itself poses a significant challenge.

Citymobil2, a programme established in 2012, partly funded by the EU and recently concluded, has over the past four years conducted pilot programmes of its driverless electric shuttles to see how they can safely implement a public transit system. If rolled out, the electric shuttles, created by mobile app developer Robosoft and driverless vehicle company EasyMile, would rely on the placing of sensors in roads ands smart traffic light systems designed to better prevent collisions. Most recently, versions of this vehicle have been roaming suburban Helsinki this summer as part of a month-long trial.

But while Citymobil2 has focused on ‘smart streets’ to make its vision a reality, other projects are taking different approaches. Chinese Internet company Baidu is using mapping technology and last year tested its autonomous driverless car on an 18.6 mile route, the technology of which will be used to create driverless public transportation in the next three years. Elsewhere, Audi, Daimler and BMW acquired Here, the former mapping division of Nokia, to make real-time maps to aid their driverless car efforts. Google is also mapping routes.

Safety and security

A further question that has been raised is how secure software embedded into cars can really be. A widely publicised episode at BMW in 2015 shed light on this: the company was forced to patch the 2.2. million cars that connect to its ConnectedDrive platform after hackers were able to unlock cars using their smartphones.

How much more vulnerable, then, would car owners be with driverless cars that require even greater integration between the vehicle and software platforms? When software is interacting with other software, data can easily be corrupted or changed and decisions made that are beyond human control. One incorrect piece of data could be the difference between ‘stop’ or ‘go’ – and it’s easy to see how this could spell disaster for a transport network.

Volvo claims that by 2020 its models will be advanced enough to rule out death or serious injury with a driver at the wheel. Add-ons like sensors to detect upcoming

The BMW i8 Concept Spyder

slippery roads or warning signals to indicate if a nearby car has its hazard lights on have all been mooted, but of course these will also rely on reliable Internet connectivity. Land Rover says it’s researching a new connected car technology that will allow a vehicle to identify the location and severity of potholes, broken drains and manhole covers, and then share this data in real time via the cloud with other vehicles and road authorities to help them prioritise repairs.

In January this year, BMW made a big splash with the world premiere of the i Vision Future Interaction Car based on the BMW i8 Concept Spyder. According to the company, this represents an important milestone on the road to Vision Zero – the idea of accident-free individual mobility. Among other things, this Concept Car demonstrated what the user interface of the future might look like, including support from high-resolution vehicle displays where the content responds to the situation. In order to make the interaction of the passengers with the vehicle as intuitive as possible, all functions are controlled using touch-sensitive surfaces, gestures and voices.

Meanwhile, the AdaptIVe consortium, led by Volkswagen with 29 other partners, has focused more on how the different stage of autonomous driving interact – from assisted driving (using parking sensors and so on) right the way up to fully automated –and how the driver can move safely from the former to the latter. But until customers can truly be reassured that their safety and privacy is not compromised, they will be reluctant to put their faith in driverless technology. So this is a marketing issue for automakers as well as a technological one.

Connecting public transport

As touched upon above with the EasyMile concept, development is not focused solely on vehicles created for the consumer market. A recent announcement from Deutsche Bahn is a good illustration of how self driving technology can be utilised to increase the efficiency of public transport networks.

According to a report in ‘Fortune’ Magazine, the company plans to operate fleets of autonomous vehicles that could be ordered via an app, similar to Uber. They would collect people from their homes and drop them at public transit systems. Not only this, but its trains are also set to make use of automated driving technology. The company has outlined plans to develop was for trains to be managed from a control centre, rather than by a driver.

The global perspective

It remains to be seen who will win the race to bring the first driverless car to market. In Europe, despite the various legislative issues touched upon above, it is at least encouraging that the EC is working to address the legality of driverless cars through initiatives such as CityMobil2. Meanwhile, in the US, there is no federal framework for implementing self-driving cars to the public. This falls to the individual states and most have not addressed the problem.

But while law may stand in the way, the US is marginally ahead of Europe when it comes to innovation. Google has of course been working on driverless cars for several years, giving it a huge head start on its rivals. Meanwhile Uber launched its ‘Advanced Technologies Center’ in February 2015 in Pittsburgh, and struck a deal with Arizona last September to test its driverless cars in public, making it another contender in the field. Elon Musk’s electric car firm Tesla also plans to launch driverless cars, starting with software updates to its existing Model S vehicles.

In Asia, Nissan and Toyota have been piloting driverless vehicles on public roads since 2013, and prototype cars already have licence plates. Singapore launched driverless car trials in October 2015. If legislation, as opposed to the speed of technology, really is the main stumbling block, it may well be that Asia gets there first. But with the lack of a general consensus on a realistic time frame – the EU parliament pitches fully automated self-drive at more than 20 years away while German Daimler wants to see mostly self-driving cars on American and western roads in about five years – there is still some way to go before we can expect self-driving cars to become the norm on our motorways and city streets. n