The car without a driver

The technology is here; fine-tuning, legal tussles ahead

Cadillac calls its no-driver driving system Super Cruise. The brand expects a version of the system to be available by the middle of this decade.

Add a comment

Thought Leadership

Sponsored by

	»
	»
	»
	»
	»

Article Tools

Reprints	Print
Respond	Size:

Related Topics

• Technology
• Vehicle Safety
• Ford
• General Motors
• United States
• Radar

Self-driving cars have become a hot topic, but it will be a long time before drivers can sit back and let the car do all the work.

Even so, while few drivers may realize it, the technology that ultimately will permit an autonomous revolution has been creeping into cars for decades. Some cars already can park themselves and automatically adjust their speed to keep pace with the traffic ahead.

"The technology is so close and is making such great strides that I think it's going to come a lot faster than people realize," says Lindsay Voss, senior program development manager of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Indeed, no-hands, no-feet driving is already on the horizon. And a handful of automakers are working to combine adaptive cruise with automatic steering so a vehicle eventually can battle traffic on its own.

Before that happens, though, the industry must hash out numerous issues that self-driving cars raise, including legal and regulatory ramifications, insurance issues and public skepticism. Among the biggest hurdles is automakers' fear of being held responsible -- either in court or just in the public's eye -- when an autonomous vehicle they build crashes.

Few in the industry can even agree on what to call such vehicles. Many who attended the inaugural Driverless Car Summit in Detroit last month objected to the term "driverless." But they say progress is steady, in spite of the obstacles.

"The legal issues, insurance -- these things will work themselves out," says Voss, whose group organized the conference.

'Crashless is the goal'

Eventually, optimistic experts say, vehicles will be able to drive themselves anywhere they're told to go. They won't crash, saving tens of thousands of lives, and they'll make highways more efficient, greatly reducing the time commuters waste in congestion.

"The impact of that on humanity would be huge," says Gary Smyth, the executive director of General Motors' North American science laboratories.

Companies such as GM and Google have built prototypes of autonomous cars to demonstrate their potential and show that the idea is not just a fantasy. But refining the technology for mass-market retail sale will take many years.

"That's a long way off," says John Maddox, associate administrator for vehicle safety research at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Even though government statistics attribute 93 percent of crashes to human error, autonomous vehicles that work well in most situations but occasionally run into problems will not be widely accepted, Maddox says.

"If we shoot for 'as good as humans,' we haven't exploited the technology enough," Maddox says. "Crashless is the goal. I don't think people are willing to accept this concept of robotic error."

Ford will use sensor and camera technology to recognize lane markers and nearby traffic and avoid collisions. But the system still will ask, at times, for the driver to assume control.

Race to be first

Ford Motor Co.'s announcement in June of a feature it calls Traffic Jam Assist shows how far researchers have come in making vehicles that drive themselves.

Ford's system uses radar and cameras to combine adaptive cruise control with automated steering control so that the vehicle keeps pace with other traffic and stays in its lane thanks to cameras that read lane markings. Ford says much of the technology needed already is on some current models, but it has not revealed how soon the feature could be offered.

Ford emphasizes that the driver would still need to be ready to take control if the lane markings disappear or the car cannot detect the path it should follow, such as in a construction zone.

Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and GM have said they are developing similar technology. GM calls its version, being developed for Cadillac, Super Cruise. The company expects to make it available as soon as 2015 or so.

Each company is racing to become the first to offer drivers the ability to take their hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals simultaneously.

There are big caveats: Ford says Traffic Jam Assist works only "in environments where there are no pedestrians, cyclists or animals, and where lanes are clearly marked." But on highways that meet those criteria, simulations indicate that equipping a quarter of vehicles with such capabilities can reduce travel times by 38 percent and delays by 20 percent, Ford says.

"In theory, you could drive all the way from Michigan to Florida and the vehicle could drive itself if you stayed in the same lane," says Dan Flores, a GM spokesman.

Drivers still needed

Flores acknowledges that figuring out how to address the issues that self-driving vehicles create is a big part of taking Super Cruise from a test track to the open road. He says GM's overarching philosophy is that the technology should make driving safer and easier but not fully remove the driver from the equation.

"We believe the driver will always have the ability to override any of the technology," Flores says. "The driver can be relaxed, but they have to be engaged and aware of what's going on. In the end, the person sitting behind the wheel is still ultimately responsible for the vehicle."

Google has generated considerable interest across the auto industry with demonstrations of the self-driving Toyota Priuses it has created. The cars have driven more than 250,000 miles autonomously, Google says.

The company has been testing them on public roads in California and Nevada. To accommodate the test, Nevada passed a law this year allowing licenses for self-driving cars -- as long as there is a person sitting in the driver's seat. California, the home of Google's headquarters, is in the process of creating a similar law, as are Florida and some other states, to encourage development of the technology and be prepared as autonomous cars begin to arrive.

But that doesn't mean Google's technology is close to being ready for the public. A big issue is cost; the special equipment installed on each car costs about $150,000, including a $70,000 laser radar system known as LIDAR, says Google engineer Chris Urmson, the company's technical lead on the project.

As with most new technology, the price will fall quickly as production volumes increase. Some suppliers are working to produce automotive LIDAR systems that cost only a few hundred dollars within a few years.

Urmson also says the cars' human drivers have had to intervene "a lot" during testing, by stepping on the brake or grabbing the steering wheel to avoid the possibility of a mishap.

One of Google's Priuses rear-ended another car in August 2011, though the company said it was being driven manually at the time. Urmson says the cars are not to the point where they can be fully trusted, particularly in crowded areas where a child might run into traffic chasing a bouncing ball, for example.

"It doesn't work in a lot of cases," Urmson says. "I wouldn't trust it in the 'bouncing ball' scenario yet."

Letting the car take over

In another demonstration, a blind man, Mark Riccobono, last year circled Florida's Daytona International Speedway in a Ford Escape outfitted with a cadre of cameras and sensors.

"The technology is really not the challenge. It's getting society to understand that this is possible," says Riccobono, the executive director of the National Federation of the Blind's Jernigan Institute.

To those skeptical about the possibility of having a blind driver alongside them on a highway, Riccobono responds: "One hundred percent of accidents are caused by sighted drivers."

GM's Flores notes that drivers' penchant for talking on cellphones, texting and doing other activities that take their attention off the road helps make a case for vehicles to take over in at least some situations.

"There are people out there driving today like their vehicle has autonomous capabilities; but they don't," Flores says.

Of course, vehicles already have many features that perform certain tasks that used to be up to the driver, including long-established technologies such as antilock brakes, automatic transmissions and cruise control.

More recently, carmakers have been rolling out crash avoidance technology that can brake automatically if sensors detect that the vehicle is approaching another object too quickly.

From that to truly autonomous driving is a huge leap, though. Organizers of the Driverless Car Summit in June said they wanted to explore the potential for autonomous vehicles to hit the country's roads within 10 years. The consensus from the gathering was that it will not happen that soon.

"Fully autonomous, maybe not, but the option to have hands-off, feet-off driving where your car takes over in certain situations is very, very realistic in the next 10 years," says Voss of the unmanned vehicle association.

"Do we get to the point where you tell your car to go to the grocery store and pick up the groceries by itself? Probably not in 10 years."

You can reach Nick Bunkley at nbunkley@crain.com. -- Follow Nick on

 Print    Respond to Editor    Reprints