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THE SOWETOBULLETIN
25 June - 15 July 2015
MOTORING SECTION It’s 2015, self-driving cars are more than a promise 2015 for autonomous driving vehicles that will be on the road sometime between 2017 and 2020. To underscore how close we’ve come, Audi sent a car 560 miles from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas with lightly trained drivers — journalists, actually — sitting behind the wheel, hands-off. Also at CES, Mercedes-Benz unveiled a swoopy prototype self-driver, the F 015 Luxury in Motion. The front seats swivel so driver and passenger can sit face to face with back seat passengers. BMW showed a self-parking i3 EV, not just parallel parking but able to hunt through a parking garage for open spaces. The same sensors avoid cars and pedestrians while under way. Ford CEO Mark Fields in a CES keynote said Ford will produce an autonomous driving car for the masses who can’t afford Audi/BMW/Mercedes level pricing. Great, but when and how “self” is the self-driving? Before 2000, estimates for autonomous, self-piloted, or self-driving cars — same thing — ranged from “never” to “maybe in our lifetime.” No car in the first DARPA self-driving contest in 2004 made it more than seven miles of the planned 150 miles in a deserted, desert course. By 2007 the majority of teams in a more complex urban course finished the race. More recently, selfdriving Google cars have been zipping around Silicon Valley (still with a driver behind the steering wheel). As of CES 2015 this month, predictions for an onsale self-driving car on the order of two to five years, or 2017 to 2020. The first cars will be self-driving on limited access roads such as interstate highways. They won’t be self-driving in urban areas though. They may be autonomous on rural roads with crossing traffic and pedestrians, farm vehicles, and crossing cars. At the least, they’ll help drivers with the monotony of longdistance trips. Piloted driving Audi A7 looks almost normal People within the industry — both on the tech and automotive sides — have a good idea of what everyone else is up to. Audi’s “piloted driving” A7 Sportback that started in Silicon Valley and drove itself to Vegas mostly unaided was a very public declaration of how close we are to autonomous driving. The A7, nicknamed Jack, looks quite normal, with few of the DARPA-era big sensors stuck to the top and sides.