Self-driving cars are getting closer all the time, because autonomous driving is coming to the new-car market in small increments – and not just to luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, but also to affordable brands like Ford and Subaru, which recently introduced its EyeSight system.
Features like "intelligent" cruise control with frontal crash-avoidance can bring your car to a complete stop if sensors detect the distance to an object ahead of you is shrinking too fast, and the driver fails to respond.
“The vehicle is making a simple decision: not to go faster than the car in front of you,” said Doug Patton, executive vice president of engineering and chief technical officer of Denso International America, Inc., Southfield, Mich.
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Rather than making giant leaps at a time, automakers are busy adding features that add incrementally to the same or similar technology.
Patton said in a recent interview that high-tech suppliers like
“If you ask me what’s available tomorrow, the next thing is lane-keeping. And when I say tomorrow, I mean literally tomorrow. In the next year or so you’re going to start seeing a lot of those kinds of technologies,” he said.
In the self-driving car field, managing expectations comes with the territory. Patton said people immediately think, “flying cars” when they hear “self-driving cars,” but those really big steps are still a long way away, he said.
“My definition of true self-driving is what I call, ‘ sleeping in the back seat.’ Everybody jumps to that conclusion, but if that’s your idea of what qualifies, it is a long way away, it is going to be a long, long time,” Patton said.
By that definition, a truly self-driving car will require the driver truly to surrender control to the car. That sounds obvious, but in the long run it’s one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the car that allows you to sleep in the back seat, he said.
“I’m not sure that’s what the public wants,” he said.
For instance, Patton recalled driving through a thunderstorm. He decided to keep driving, even though visibility was terrible. In his opinion, when his car got to a railroad crossing in the poor visibility, a truly autonomous car might have stopped, and refused to cross the tracks.
“If you were in a … car with no steering wheel, there’s no way you would’ve got past that gate. This really drove it home to me: this is a really, really critical piece of the future,” Patton said. Gaining consumer acceptance for surrendering that much control would be easier said than done, he said. “If that had been my autonomous car, I would’ve been going nuts.”
