Driverless cars coming down the track

“I was driving along when a guy veered into me. My brain said ‘swerve and brake’ but, before my foot could move the car had already done it for me. It was a very weird experience to have the car take over, but I was thrilled because I wouldn’t have reacted fast enough and the other driver would have collided with me.”

John Horn is a former T-Mobile executive and president of RacoWireless, a service provider to the fast-growing connected car industry which includes Audi as one of its customers. He was driving Audi's self-driving car that takes over in situations such as the one described above.

Using radar and cameras, the Pre Sense technology responds to external signs of a possible collision faster than a person could, both activating the brakes and tightening the seat belt in case of impact.

In many ways you could say that the car of the future has already arrived, but Andreas Reich, head of Audi's Electronic Predevelopment, says that the automobile company has plans for even more advanced technology that will bring the car owner into the era of the "piloted car" – one that does all the boring, time-consuming or tricky stuff no driver enjoys, such as parking, waiting in traffic or driving for long stretches at a time.

"We've been working on autonomous driving here at Audi for a long time but our plan is not to build a driving machine where the driver ceases to drive," says Reich, referring to the concept of the driverless car that often makes people think of the futuristic cars in Minority Report where you are a passenger and no longer a driver.

“We have a very exciting car and want customers to drive it and have fun with it, but then there are boring situations like being stuck in traffic jams. In this case it makes sense to hand over the task of driving to the car.”

Reich observes that for cars with self-driving features to ultimately appeal to a wider public it must be at the point where people think, “I don’t want to drive in this situation”.

“Right now we have a functional parking garage pilot. You leave your car at the garage entrance, press a button and the car goes by itself to the parking space. You need not sit in the car while it’s finding a space because isn’t that such a boring situation to be in?”

‘Ethical questions’

One situation where completely driverless cars could be of use is for people with disabilities. “It could be a goal in the future, I think it’s a good goal but we have to be prepared for the fact that it is fundamentally different than assisted driving because there are a lot of ethical questions.”

We have all seen Google's completely driverless car being "driven" by sight-impaired individual Steve Mahan. This kind of technology would give more freedom to individuals of limited mobility but it is in the early stages of testing; no ethical evaluation or legislative reform has been introduced that would help us work our way through questions of what happens when a person runs out in front of a driverless car or if the car has to choose between colliding with a wall or another vehicle.

However, there is a need for some kind of automated car in relation to an ageing population, says Chris Gerdes, director at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford .

“Although many technological advances seem to be advocated by younger people, in my experience, I’ve had a lot of older people come and say, ‘Get this on the road soon. I realise my driving skills are deteriorating’. The correlation between mobility and health is so dramatic that I think there really is quite an increasing market here for this sort of technology,” he adds.

Semi-automation is possibly the answer, says Reich. “If you’re older, making long trips by car can be tiring. In the situation of driving on motorways from one city to another, ideally there would be a point in the middle where the car takes over. Our goal is to bring something like this.”

With these varying levels of automation, the question on everybody's mind is who takes responsibility in the case of an accident? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US has created an official classification system, with five levels of automation: level 0 is what most people have now, a car controlled by the driver at all times, while level 4 is the Google driverless car. New legislation and insurance practices are emerging to meet the post-level 0 world we're already living in.

Regulations

Reich points out that four US states (Florida,

California

,

Nevada

and Michigan) have already brought in laws in relation to autonomous vehicles, but here in

Europe

there are regulations on how cars are allowed to drive (the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic) and autonomous cars are currently not allowed. However, a recent amendment to Article 8 of the convention was passed, ostensibly allowing owners of autonomous cars to take their hands off the wheel while driving.

The important difference, says Reich, is that at any time, it should be in the driver’s power take control of this technology: “it’s a very important point, and our point too, because if the driver wants to take over at any point they should be allowed to.”

The future of the driverless car, it seems, should include the metaphorical big red button, lest the power we give software to drive for us is a power we cannot so easily get back.