CES: autonomous vehicle advancements reach hard-work phase
So when are our cars — and our trucks and our, umm, motorcycles — finally going to drive themselves? That’s been the tantalizing promise for a few years now, and at the world’s newest major auto show, CES, in particular.
Most industry experts still say we have a few years to go.
Signs of interest and progress continued to be widespread at the 2019 edition of the show, starting with the opening LG keynote, which illustrated a concept vehicle in Seoul, South Korea, where the focus for the people in the vehicle is on shopping and entertainment, not driving. BMW did in fact showcase a self-driving motorcycle, Qualcomm stepped up with its third-generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit platform that scales AI for vehicles from entry-level to luxury, and Valeo used augmented reality to make the trailer you’re pulling appear transparent when you view it through an in-car display.
But ultimately there was a lot of pragmatism in recognizing that we have a few years to get to level 4 (fully autonomous) and level 5 (fully autonomous in any driving environment). I got picked up by Lyft in a self-driving vehicle to go a pretty short distance from the Luxor to Waldorf-Astoria but even there a driver was needed to take the vehicle on and off resort property and the car had trouble navigating some construction cones on the Strip.
So instead, we’re seeing companies continue the hard work to achieve those advanced levels of autonomy while delivering a lot of level 2 benefits in the near term — in which at least one driver assistance system is automated.
For example, BMW’s X7 SUV showed its ability to help navigate extreme inclines and declines, on the order of 25 percent, with controlled braking and downhill speeds. It was like riding in a slow motion (and rather luxe) roller coaster. Freightliner brought Level 2 autonomy to trucking, particularly with safety features like automatic pre-collision braking. And NVIDIA’s so-called “Level 2+” DRIVE AutoPilot gives automakers a package of autonomous capabilities they can bring to market as early as next year, including highway merge, lane change, driver monitoring, and AI co-pilot.
What do you expect for a technology that very predictably fell into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment this summer in the analyst firm’s latest Hype Cycle for Connected Vehicles and Smart Mobility? It is, after all, the only way for most technologies to advance to the promised land of the Plateau of Productivity. In other words, at some point we’ve got to get real to make it real. After all, people have been hurt by autonomous vehicles recently and that has a way of focusing industry attention on the details, even if in many scenarios humans might already be worse drivers than AI.
In the meantime, my autonomous driver during rush hour will continue to be a human steering a bus while I enjoy wifi on my laptop or just staring out the window. It’s like the future is already here for me!
