Despite Advances, Automated Driving Still Has A Long Road

Yesterday GM Authority told you about General Motors and Opel’s experiments with semi-automated driving. However, as neat as it sounds, there still are major hurdles with driverless cars that need to be addressed before they are mainstreamed into society.

That was the opinion of several panelists at the 2014 Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress. As reported by Automotive News, “Improving sensor technology, solving legal issues and getting real-time mapping and traffic information into vehicles” are several issues that must be solved, according to the panelists.

“We’re not going to jump into fully automated driving,” says Bosch’s head of driver assistance and automated driving, Kay Stepper. “It will be a step-by-step introduction … Automated driving door-to-door is a topic for next decade.”

On General Motor’s end, CEO Mary Barra said Sunday that Cadillac will offer a “V2V” hands-off driving system with braking and steering “assisted” by computers in certain driving conditions like inclement weather. General Motors’ director of controls and active safety technology, John Capp, said that engineers are working on sensors that will be able to tolerate poor driving conditions, but he also said that for this to work, a cloud must be utilized so that automated driving systems are able to access mapping and real-time traffic data. “If we know we are in space on a detailed map, we can make more use of sensors.”

Stepper added that upon perfection, it will be a huge challenge to show the technology is perfected for every driving situation: “The validation will have to be that your system will not have one single failure.”

A hurdle often not considered by laymen and women was articulated by the director of R&D at Southwest Research Institute, Steven Dellenback − he said the cost of developing the software is akin to writing software for a manned space flight: “The cost of each line of software is incredible.”