Auto manufacturers revealed plans for cars with self-driving capabilities at the New York Auto Show last week. These include cars that will be on the market within a year or two.
Volvo, for example, plans to introduce a car this Spring that can “take over both the steering and throttle to follow the car in front of it at speeds up to about 35 miles per hour.” Audi plans to offer cars with a similar feature (up to 40 mph) as soon as January, 2016. The manufacturers use some variation of the term “traffic jam assist” to describe this feature. While the drive won’t actually be steering the car, for liability reasons the cars will require that the drivers keep their hands on the steering wheel or at least put them there every 10 seconds or so.
Late next year Cadillac will offer its top-of-the-line CT6 model with a “super cruise” feature that will combine self-steering and adaptive cruise control at highways speeds: “hands-off-the-wheel, feet-off-the-pedals highway driving.” Cadillac publicity has at least implied that drivers will be able to take their hands off the steering wheel for extended periods without having to touch the wheel every 15 seconds or so like other brands. GM had announced this feature last year, but gave more particulars at the New York show.
Delphi’s self-driving Audi finished its trip from San Francisco to New York, with the company saying the car successfully drove itself for “99 percent” of the 3,400-mile route. The company has documented the journey with videos and tweets, but I haven’t seen any indication of which 1 percent of the trip that human drivers needed to take over or why.
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Delphi claims that the car was able to handle “complex driving situations such as traffic circles, construction zones, bridges, tunnels, aggressive drivers and a variety of weather condition.” It did say that a “human driver may need to take over in “extremely complex” circumstances like major construction zones.”
Delphi equipped the car with “six long-range radars, four short-range radars, three vision-based cameras, six lidars, a localization system, intelligent software algorithms and a full suite of Advanced Drive Assistance Systems.” Since the lowest-cost Lidar systems today are about $8,000 apiece, such a car is not yet in the affordable category. But Lidars are still handmade, so once someone sets up large-scale production, the cost is likely to fall to a few hundred dollars per car.
In other self-driving news, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Contra Costa Transportation Authority is planning to use a former military base with 20 miles of roads to test self-driving buses and other automated vehicles. The transit agency has invited auto manufacturers to take advantage of the testing area while waiting for state licenses to use their cars on California highways. To dedicate the test facility, the agency held a conference on March 31 featuring a variety of presentations on autonomous vehicle technologies.
Left unsaid was any speculation on whether transit agencies would be able to survive the maturation of autonomous vehicles. The Antiplanner suspects that transit will still make sense in very high-density areas such as New York City and a few other major cities. But it will make little sense to run buses to low-density suburbs or even in low-density cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and San Jose when those buses have to compete against shared self-driving cars.
Which pretty much makes humans obsolete. :$