Say “self-driving car” and people may think of Silicon Valley, Germany or Detroit. Tesla and Google have been the Valley’s pace-setters, Audi’s A7 has been driving itself around for a couple of years now and Ford says it will have a driverless car by 2021.
But ignoring Asia would be missing a huge part of the parallel, if lesser-noticed, development of autonomous vehicles in China, Japan and Korea. Some efforts there are already leading the autonomous revolution.
Recently, Samsung Electronics announced it was buying car technology company Harman for $8 billion. Samsung gets a company that makes, in addition to well-known audio components, telematics, navigation and driver-assist technology for cars.
At the Los Angeles Auto Show this month, Hyundai Motor unveiled a driverless concept version of its Ioniq, a new sedan offered in hybrid, plug-in hybrid and all-electric modes.
In Japan, the big automakers and parts makers have formed a consortium to develop driverless cars with the goal of having them ready for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Thanks to its relaxed regulations on testing, China may vault ahead of everyone else shortly, as it seeks to build driverless trucks to ease congestion and improve commerce.
Autonomous vehicles are coming; that’s an indisputable fact. Despite consumer misgivings, and perhaps counterintuitively, safety is the most compelling reason. Ninety-four percent of all auto crashes are caused by human error. Our grandchildren may be incredulous when we tell them we once trusted driving to humans.
Aside from the PR challenge, there are a couple of ways to get there. We won’t be zooming along in the high-speed, wall-climbing, maglev saloons of “Minority Report” anytime soon, but we won’t have to.
The first way to get to autonomous driving is by taking a series of small steps, many of which already are underway.
American drivers are growing accustomed to leaning on a number of safety features in their cars. Blind spot detection systems beep and show a warning icon if a driver wants to change lanes while there’s a vehicle in their blind spot. Lane-change assist measures the speed of a vehicle approaching from the rear and warns the driver if it’s unsafe to change lanes. Adaptive cruise control maintains the distance between a car and the car in front. Lane departure warning tells a driver if they’re crossing the center line and can send both an audible and haptic warning – the steering wheel vibrates. Emergency automatic breaking stops the car by itself if something quickly appears in front.
These features aren’t foolproof yet – lane departure warning systems can’t work if snow is covering highway lane markers, for instance.
But it is a short step from here to cars communicating with each other – telematics. At a blind intersection, for instance, your car may detect and talk to an unseen approaching car, warning both drivers and possibly stopping both automatically.
Telematics is part of Samsung’s play with Harman. Every car going forward will need the software that powers all of these semi-autonomous safety and communication features. Harman is already a Tier 1, or primary, supplier to many automakers, so Samsung buys those relationships.
The other way to get to self-driving cars is to build autonomous cars from the get-go.
Visitors to the L.A. Auto Show could be forgiven for missing Hyundai’s Ioniq autonomous car, but that was the point. The automaker has concealed all of the hardware and sensors needed for self-driving under the Ioniq’s sheet metal. The company said it wanted to build a car that looked like any other on the road and “not a high school science project,” throwing a little shade on its competitors, whose autonomous cars bristle with cameras and sensors and antenna. (It’s worth noting that the head of Google’s self-driving car program is John Krafcik, former Hyundai Motor America CEO.)
China fully intends to compete in the autonomous consumer car segment. The government recently released a roadmap that seeks to develop cars that can drive themselves in most situations by 2025. Baidu, which is China’s Google, is leading the effort with big data and deep learning and recently began public trials of its own self-driving cars, despite severing its autonomous driving partnership with BMW, noting the two companies differed on how to proceed. (Guess: BMW was too slow for Baidu.)
But the real driver in China, so to speak, may be long-haul trucking. The country is so big and the trucking industry so vast, non-stop cross-country truck trips can require two or three drivers, so they can rotate sleeping shifts. If trucks can be made self-driving, that will reduce the number of drivers needed and eliminate the danger of tired truck drivers on the road.
China’s competitive advantage is that it does not yet have the degree of regulations and restrictions on self-driving vehicle testing that are found in the U.S. and Europe. This means vehicles can come to market faster. It also means it may be more dangerous on Chinese roads in the coming years.
Forty years ago, Detroit automakers and American consumers laughed at the cars coming out of Asia. They won't make the same mistake twice.
