A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Driving Cars

Everything you should know before your next conversation about self-driving cars

Anyi Sun
The Startup
Published in
9 min readOct 25, 2018

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Some call it a marvel of technology. Some call it a fad. Self-driving cars are constantly making the headlines. These vehicles, designed to carry passengers from point A to B without a human maneuver, are promised to bring greater mobility, reduce street congestion and fuel consumption, and create safer roads.

Driverless vehicles are hardly a novel concept anymore, but what is really going on in the autonomous car industry? How do self-driving cars work? Who are making these cars? Why is it taking this long? This article will answer these questions.

How do self-driving cars work

To reach a destination, a driverless car needs to know the route, understand its surrounding, observe traffic rules, and make correct judgments when interacting with other vehicles and pedestrians on the road. To accomplish all this, it relies on the following key technologies:

  • Camera: to see things like lanes and traffic lights
  • Radar: to sense objects, especially the big ones, and determine their distances
  • Lidar: also to sense objects as Radar, but it’s much better in detecting small objects and mapping 3D objects. Unfortunately, it is expensive and can still be a little unreliable at times.
  • AI: the brain of the car. It combines the car’s sensors and camera visions to understand the path ahead and determine how the car should be maneuvered.

Leveling up

The progression of driverless technology doesn’t go from no automation at all to full-on self-driving with no human intervention. In fact, SAE International, an automotive standardization organization classified autonomous cars to 5 levels:

  • Level 0 — No Automation: Human driver controls everything — steering, braking, and accelerating.
  • Level 1 — Driver Assistance: The car provides some help with either steering OR accelerating. Cars with cruise controls fall into this category.
  • Level 2 — Partial Automation: The car can control both steering and accelerating at the same…

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Anyi Sun
The Startup

Designing digital experiences @ Koi Studios. I write about design, psychology and technology.