Who’s Winning the Race to Build the Self-Driving Car?

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In the race to build the self-driving car some of the main competitors are Google with its Self-Driving Car Project, car makers Ford, Audi/Delphi, Tesla, Nissan, GM, and ride service operator Uber. In five to 10 years, consumers may be seeking a car loan to buy such vehicles from one of these automakers. Autonomous cars from Google, Tesla, and GM Cadillac may be tempting consumers to check auto loan interest rates and auto refinance.

Google’s second generation self-driving car is a 100% autonomous, prototype electric vehicle (code-named “Koala”) that relies on its arrays of radar, lasers and cameras to distinguish buildings, obstacles, other drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, street signs, and lane markers around it to the length of two football fields. Navigation is handled by sophisticated onboard computer algorithms, and top speed is limited to 25 mph.

Beginning in May, smiling Google Koalas have been driving autonomously through the public streets of Mountain View, CA, dealing with complex street traffic. Their September monthly status report states that there is now a fleet of 25 Koala prototypes on public streets in Mountain View, CA, and Austin, TX as well as 23 first generation self-driving test cars. A total of 1,210,676 miles has been driven in autonomous mode, with 911,252 driven by test drivers in manual mode, averaging 10,000-15,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets. The cars have been involved in a total of 16 minor accidents in 2 million miles of manual and autonomous driving combined, none of which they caused. Google has announced that their self-driving cars will be available within five years.

A 3,400 miles cross-country trip from San Francisco to New York City was completed in April by carmaker Audi in collaboration with equipment manufacturer Delphi. The journey crossed 15 states and Washington DC, encompassing highways, construction zones, bridges, roundabouts, tunnels, traffic, and various weather conditions. 99% of the journey was accomplished driving autonomously at about 70 mph on highways, observing all speed limits, with 1% manually driven in more complicated conditions. Audi will start offering advanced self-driving features in its autos by the end of 2016.

Automaker Ford created a team in June to develop autonomous vehicles, and over the next five years will migrate driver-assist technologies across its product lines. Ford has already offers its Fusion model with driver-assist features such as adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping and parallel park.

pic1Nissan hopes to have a fully autonomous car that can tour Japan highways on its own in 2016 and to have a self-driving car for cities by 2020. Its Silicon Valley Research Center is in a five-year partnership with NASA Ames Research Center. Nissan cautions, however, that there may be delays in being able to comply with regulations for operating autonomous vehicles in all the countries where it sells its cars.

GM already offers driver-assist features in its Cadillacs and has announced a 2016 Cadillac SuperCruise feature that will allow the driver to take hands and feet off the wheel, gas and brakes in certain highway situations. In 2017, GM will offer vehicle-to-vehicle communication that will allow cars to share information on their speed and position, without the need for arrays of radar, sensors and camera, but all cars must have the same V2V technology for it to be useful.

Tesla, as of October 14, gave all its recently built Model S cars, overnight, the ability under highway conditions to drive themselves, perform lane changes, and avoid side collisions as long as the driver keeps a hand on the wheel. The entire Tesla fleet is linked by their central network server, so that what one car learns is analyzed and passed on to all others in time including the high-precision maps from its cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensor arrays.

Uber is building up a robotics lab in Pittsburgh, which will create self-driving taxis and is starting from the ground up. Uber CEO reportedly has said that if Tesla builds its fully autonomous electric car by 2020, he will buy 500,000 of them. They are an ideal way to eliminate traffic gridlock, and like Google Koalas, get people moving efficiently, and provide an exceptionally safe commute.

Google and Tesla for different reasons have been the most impressive in their drive to develop autonomous cars. Google is the farthest along in its autonomous prototypes and its approach to earning consumer trust with safe, friendly vehicles. Tesla with its highway autopiloting cars is close behind, but city driving is much more challenging. GM may be next with its driver assist features and SuperCruise. If Nissan has the ability to rapidly progress along its aggressive schedule, it may be close behind GM. Uber although a highly capitalized company has only just started on a course of robotics research and would be glad to buy Tesla’s entire autonomous car output in 2020. Self-driving cars are definitely game-changers, and regulatory, licensing and insurance bodies are scrambling to adjust to these new players.

 

By: Vincent Stokes 

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