BMW has announced that it will demonstrate a valet-parking car at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. This is more than a car that can parallel park by itself. Instead, it is a car that can cruise through a parking garage until it finds an empty space and park there until recalled on a smart phone (or smart watch), at which time it will drive itself to the car’s owner.
Official BMW photo of a car supposedly demonstrating self-parking capabilities. Click image for a larger view.
BMW hasn’t said yet when this feature might be available to actual car-buyers. Some suggest that it might be available on BMW 7-series cars in 2016, but that is only speculation.
Official BMW photo of a watch supposedly ordering a parked car to pick up its driver. No doubt an app will be available for the Apple Watch. Click image for a larger view.
If you are in the market for a self-driving car in 2015, the closest you can get, in the United States anyway, is one with adaptive-cruise control, lane keeping, and collision avoidance. There are several cars that come with these features for less than $30,000, most of them made by Subaru.
Auto manufacturers have perfected other technologies, including lane centering. Whereas lane keeping just alerts drivers if they drift out of a lane, lane centering will actually steer between the stripes. But when Mercedes Benz had the chance to include this feature on its new cars, it lost its nerve and went with a system that will shut itself off if it detects that the driver has taken his or her hands off the wheel for 15 seconds. Worried about liability, Infiniti, Lexus, Acura, and other high-end brands have all done the same thing to their lane-centering systems.
When I asked Google engineer Andrew Levendowski about liability issues, he answered that since Google’s cars recorded everything that went on around them, they would easily be able to prove whether or not their car was at fault for any accident. But Mercedes feared that such a recording system would turn off potential car buyers due to privacy concerns.
Audi demonstrates its self-driving car at 190 mph.
Another technology that ought to be available, but isn’t–probably due to to liability concerns–is Audi’s traffic jam assist, which is a step beyond adaptive cruise control and lane centering. Cars with this feature will follow the car in front even if that car changes lanes (making certain that any lane changes don’t cause a collision with cars in other lanes). Thus, if traffic is detouring around an accident, construction, or another obstruction, the car with traffic jam assist can follow the traffic rather than insist on staying in the lane. Here’s a list of other features that various manufacturers have developed, many of which haven’t yet been brought to market.
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Audi is promising traffic jam assist and even more self-driving car features by 2016. But where will these cars be sold? The Vienna Convention requires that cars in Europe have human drivers, so they won’t be available there unless that convention is changed. Audi will have to risk America’s ruthless liability lawyers to introduce them here.
For now, those wishing to take advantage of self-driving technologies are left mainly with adaptive cruise control. The Antiplanner recently test-drove a Subaru with Eyesight, Subaru’s system that combines adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane-departure warnings.
The good news is that Subaru’s adaptive cruise control is nearly flawless in most driving conditions. When driving, the operator merely has to turn cruise control on and set the speed, and the car will lock on to any car in front and mimic that car’s speed. If there is no car in front, the car will go whatever maximum speed the driver sets. If the driver set the speed when following a car that is going, say, 45 mph in a 55 mph zone, the driver can click a button twice to set the speed for 55 (5 mph more for each click). When the slow-moving vehicle gets out of the way, the car will automatically speed up to 55. If the car in front comes to a complete stop, then starts again, the driver needs to press the accelerator to tell the Subaru to move.
With a click of a button, drivers can choose how close they want to follow the vehicle in front–approximately 1.0 seconds, 1.5, or 2.0 seconds behind. If the car is truly safe to drive just one second away from the next car, then people using this system could nearly double the capacity of highways, which today can handle no more than about 1,800 vehicles per lane per hour without risking a serious breakdown in traffic.
Even when adaptive cruise control is turned off, Eyesight will do its best to avoid a collision if a driver negligently approaches a slower or stationary object without stopping. In tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Subaru’s Eyesight was the only frontal crash prevention system that came to a complete stop from 25 mph without hitting a stationary object.
Eyesight’s version of lane keeping, however, does little more than warn the driver (with a beep and a dashboard light) if the car drifts across a striped lane without signaling. Subaru’s cars do have other sensors that can detect and warn you if you attempt to change lanes when a car is in your blind spot.
Many of these Eyesight features were available in Japan more than a decade before being introduced here. Even today, Japanese can buy a Subaru with a stronger version of lane keeping than in the United States.
Subaru’s lowest-priced car with Eyesight is the Legacy, whose list price with the feature is $25, 785, though it can probably be purchased for about a thousand dollars less. Subaru plans to make the technology available on the Impreza soon, which will cost even less, but at the moment it can’t keep up with the demand for the feature on its other cars.
The bad news is that the Eyesight system is based on optical sensors, which suffer the same problems as human eyes: although the system will work at night so long as vehicles in front have their taillights on, it is stymied by fog or heavy rain and snow (as I discovered when I entered a fog bank), and can be blinded by evening sun. If you need an affordable car that works in these conditions, the Mazda 3 is the lowest-priced car that uses a radar system. However, it won’t bring your car to a complete stop if the car in front is stopping.
I found the Subaru to be far more relaxing to drive in traffic than one whose speed I had to vary myself. I’m not fond of driving, but I find it a lot easier if I can set a car in cruise control on a highway and just steer. When in traffic, I find the constant changes of speed to be highly stressful. The adaptive cruise control takes that stress away.
When Google or some other software maker has the software for a fully self-driving car available for sale, it should be possible to upgrade at least some cars that are being made today. The more sensors a car has today, the lower the cost of such an upgrade. I suspect the Subaru will need several more sensors added, including laser, infrared, or radar sensors, before it can become full self-driving. Cars like Audi, Acura, and Mercedes currently come with more sensors and so a full upgrade would probably cost less.
The BMW press release makes it sound like you need a digital site plan of the parking garage for it to park itself. Do they exist for most garages?
From the article:
From what I can tell, the car just needs a pretty simple 3D map of the parking garage because GPS often doesn’t work inside. BMW’s pointing out that the building doesn’t need “complex infrastructure” maybe indicates that a a software map will need to be available, and delivered wirelessly, to the autonomous car as it enters the garage.
Wonder if the time will come when most adults no longer know how to operate a motor vehicle, just like most adults in the U.S. probably cannot ride a horse or control horses pulling a horse-drawn vehicle?
“Wonder if the time will come when most adults no longer know how to operate a motor vehicle”
That time is already here. Given the amount of people I see tailgating, blowing stop signs and lights, not knowing to yield to the car on the right at a tie in a four-way stop, texting and driving, etc., etc.
“like most adults in the U.S. probably cannot ride a horse”
Apples/oranges. Cars/horses. Horses are intelligent, and riding a horse is not hard to do; I’ve only been on a horse a few times in my life, and the time between my last two ridings was nearly 15 years. Yet the last time I rode a horse, after minimal instructions from the trail guides, it was simple. Anyone can ride a horse.
Frank,
This isn’t at all critical to the point of this entry, but I think that you’re overestimating how easy it is to ride a horse. Like you, I’ve only ridden a horse a few times but my parents grew up in a time and place where riding a horse was part of their everyday life and occasionally they’d talk about it. It is true that in the right situation on a docile horse riding can be easy. However in other situations riding can be very difficult. Horses are somewhat intelligent, but they can also be very irrational. When faced with an unexpected situation they might decide that their best course of action is to throw you off their back and get out of there. Also, when tying to move quickly there is always the chance a horse can trip and fall with disastrous results for you.
I recently purchased a Toyota Highlander with the same features as described. It is quite nice, but I see a couple of drawbacks compared to a fully autonomous vehicle:
The adaptive cruise control and lane keeping make it easy to lose the normal driver situational awareness. This could potentially be a safety problem.
Also, there is a bug in the adaptive cruise control. If you are close behind someone (in the 1 second setting) and feel uncomfortable, you can switch to 2 or 3 seconds. Shortly after you do this, the car brakes suddenly, forcing the car behind to brake or run into you. The same will happen if you engage the adaptive cruise control while closer than the set distance. These seem to be bugs – software could easily change to just warn if you are too close while backing off on the throttle.
CapitalistRoader:
Before the google cars can drive on a road they first need a map prepared for them. They have a scanning vehicle drive along the road, and google engineers go through the data by hand to make sure they have identified everything they need to. Is this what BMW needs for the garage? Or just a simpler schematic? How well can it handle disruptions i.e. if a section of the garage is closed off to fix some lights, paint, store construction equipment etc…effectively changing the garage layout? Would they have to be programmed into the map? The press release doesn’t really get into this. How many garages will find it worth their time to put together and maintain a map and the communications equipment to send it to a car? What benefit do they see?
“This isn’t at all critical to the point of this entry”
True.
Coming back to C. P.’s pondering, perhaps it is true that there will come a time when people can no longer drive. Comparing riding a horse to driving is spurious, as one can ride a horse—as you say, under the right conditions—with little training. However, learning how to drive takes lots of time and practice.
In fact, to get my first license (in CA) I had to take at least 30 hours of driver education in a class environment and then take a test and then log 50 hours with a licensed driver over 25. Along with in-class driver education, I had a number of required driving hours with a certified instructor.
Our group of three chose to drive to Crater Lake for our road practice, and I’ll never forget my slow reaction time as I made my first turn off Highway 62 to go up to Rim Drive. Almost ended up in the trees, but luckily my instructor had a brake on his side and could grab the wheel!
My point? Learning to drive even at a basic level is far more time consuming and difficult than learning to ride a horse at a basic level. Hence, the bad comparison.
Agreed that there could come a time when people don’t know how to operate a car, but that is probably decades away.
Frank wrote:
Apples/oranges. Cars/horses. Horses are intelligent, and riding a horse is not hard to do; I’ve only been on a horse a few times in my life, and the time between my last two ridings was nearly 15 years. Yet the last time I rode a horse, after minimal instructions from the trail guides, it was simple. Anyone can ride a horse.
I sure as Hades cannot ride a horse, perhaps because the one time I tried, the experience was remarkably unpleasant.
Maybe it’s an East vs. West thing?
Frank do you think you could use a horse to get around on a regular basis? Say if you had to ride it a few miles into town by yourself, tie it to a post, conduct your business, and then head back? What if some coyotes show up, could you keep it from being spooked? Without additional training do you think you could care for the horse? Know when you were pushing it too hard and needed to give it a day off, what/how much to feed, keep it safe from predators etc…? If you could, do you think most people could without days-weeks of training?
Driving a car on an empty road is easy and can be done with minimal training. It’s just not what people mean by ‘knowing how to drive’. If you take knowing how to ride a horse to mean being capable of getting around day to day on a horse in an environment comparable to what existed when horses were regularly used for transportation I don’t think most people could pick it up over night. Riding with a few people on a trail the horse has probably been down a hundred times with the same guide in front seems to ask much less of the rider.
Quite the interesting discussion today about horses vs. cars vs. autonomous cars and where we’ve been and where we’re going!
C.P.: Perhaps it is a west vs. east issue. Sorry your experience was so bad! I love riding horses, but don’t do it enough. Truth be told, part of me would prefer to get on a horse to get around as it’s slower, more peaceful, and in some ways, more civilized. However, I don’t have time to shovel horse shit.
And yes, ahwr, caring for a horse is quite different than riding one on the trail. Perhaps most people could not pick up getting around on a horse overnight, but many of your questions, including care for a horse, could be asked of drivers. How many people can change their own oil? Batteries? Break lights? Starters? Timing belts? Tires? How many people simply take their cars to others for these services? How many drivers push their car too far above the red line or go too long without an oil change or or other maintenance or bald tires or blown shocks or bad brakes? What if gang bangers or other predators showed up and put a gun to your head and demand your car? What would happen then!?
Still, I maintain that riding a horse from your farm to town would be a lot easier and quicker to pick up for non-riders than it would be for non-drivers to do the same.
And just as horse riding is a niche or hobby now, so may manually driving a car become in the future.
So be it.
”
The BMW press release makes it sound like you need a digital site plan of the parking garage for it to park itself. Do they exist for most garages?
”
~ahwr
That’s a good question. More importantly is if they _will_ exist. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re equiped with technology to auto map and auto upload those garages. It may sound odd but keep in mind some apps like SongKick on your smart phone will map the inside of a store while running in the background.
I meant ShopKick. Songkick is a great app, though.
prk166: do you mean you would drive through the whole garage once and the car could put together a map from that? if it could do so on its own then it wouldn’t need a digital site plan. this sounds like the google car that needs a prepared map before it can drive on a road
frank: car maintenance is different. you can drive thousands of miles without needing to do anything. a horse needs more regular care than that, doesn’t it? someone trying to steal your car? give it up, hope they don’t kill you, just like if someone tries to mug you and you don’t have a way to defend yourself. it’s not a novel event unique to driving. doesn’t it take quite a bit of skill to control a horse that’s spooked by wild animals? seems different
@ahwr:
Like anything else, it will be a cost/benefit analysis. The high-end garages will be the first adopters because their clientele will demand it. And as the BMW article implies, the infrastructure could be as simple a wireless signal and a 3D map on a tiny server, while ongoing updates could be as simple as the existing security employee driving through the garage with a spatial recording device whenever there’s a change in the structure that could affect how autonomous cars navigate,. That could be once a day or once a month, or never if the garage never changes.
Just thinking out loud: The high-end mall advertises automated storage and retrieval of patrons’ properly equipped automobiles. Rich people with said cars stop at the entrance of the parking garage, get out, and their automobiles store themselves. Done with shopping/dining/whatever, walking back to the garage the patron summons her car on her smartphone and it’s waiting for her.
That’s five years away for rich people and ten years away for us stuck in steerage. I can’t wait. Cars are a PITA. Anything that can be done to make them more user friendly is OK with me.
Well, that went from interesting to pedantic. Yep. Fine. Yep. Sure. Uh huh. Argument for the sake of being contrary. So fun.
And I’m still waiting to hear how the people who drive or even bus to work on Nickerson benefit from lower capacity and slower travel times.