Truly autonomous, aka Level 5, cars are still science fiction

There are still morons out there that think they can make automobile autonomous computers do what the world's greatest computer – the human brain – the one God created – can do

Machines are already a huge help to auto drivers. Take automatic emergency braking, or AEB. That’s when your car stops itself if it detects that you’re about to hit another vehicle or other obstacle. According to new data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, AEB reduces rear-end crashes by 50%, and reduces crashes with injuries by 56%. In the U.S., there were 1.7 million such rear-end crashes in 2012, resulting in 1,700 deaths and 500,000 injuries, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Mass deployment will take many years, but the NTSB has estimated that this technology could eventually reduce fatalities and injuries from rear-end crashes by 80%.

By 2022, nearly all new vehicles in the U.S. will have at least automatic emergency braking, thanks to a voluntary commitment made by 20 auto makers, from a small but growing percentage of new cars today.

AEB and related Level 1 technologies such as lane-departure warning, blind-spot detection and reverse automatic braking—collectively known as ADAS, or advanced driver assistance systems–are just the beginning.

Cars are also beginning to incorporate technology developed for fully self-driving cars, such as ultra-detailed, centimeter-accurate maps of much of the U.S. highway system. Cars navigate on through these maps and the real world using a combination of GPS and other location technologies. Some of these systems, known as Level 2, are actually able to drive for a human on highways, says Amnon Shashua, chief executive of Intel Corp. subsidiary Mobileye, which provides the majority of cameras and processors used in today’s driver-assistance systems. These maps are what enable partial self-driving in the newest Nissan Rogue, Leaf and Altima models with the ProPilot Assist system, and in the new Audi A8, he says.

These systems can drive for you but they require you to pay attention to the road, and keep your hands on the wheel. (Sometimes they even use cameras to check on you.) They’re a kind of enhanced cruise control that can steer to keep the car in the lane and maintain a safe following distance from the car ahead. Camera-based sensors can sometimes have trouble spotting poor lane markings, but systems like Cadillac’s Super Cruise use maps so detailed, they know where the lane is, regardless of whether they can sense the markings.

The challenge is measuring the effectiveness of Level 2 self-driving technology. It will in theory lead to even safer vehicles, in part because they’re programmed to drive more conservatively than humans tend to, says Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But there isn’t enough data to know the magnitude of the effect it will have, he says.

The data will likely arrive soon. Nissan’s aggressive expansion of ProPilot will make it a standard feature on all vehicles. In 2021, about 1 million vehicles with ProPilot will ship world-wide, says Andy Christensen, senior manager at Nissan’s North American technical center. GM is planning to roll out its Super Cruise system—which uses an ultra-detailed road map similar to the one built by Mobileye–for all Cadillac models in 2020.

Ford has just started offering its first Level 2 self-driving system, adaptive cruise control with lane centering, as an option. Honda and Toyota offer ADAS technologies on the majority of their new vehicles and some form of adaptive cruise control as an option on many.

For decades ahead, this fusion of human minds and machine reflexes will likely be the norm. Researchers at Cleveland State University estimate that only 10 to 30 percent of all vehicles will be fully self driving by 2030. That’s in line with predictions from others—a PwC analysis estimates that 12% of all vehicles will be fully autonomous by then. Initially, all fully self-driving vehicles will be Level 4—that is, they have to be in geographically constrained areas, and will only operate in good weather, as does Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vans that it is testing in Phoenix. Truly autonomous, aka Level 5, cars are still science fiction. See full article at WSJ.com