Cars without steering wheels and pedals, cars without human drivers inside

It could be the worst nightmare of those who enjoy driving: hundreds of cars on the road without steering wheels, brakes and accelerator pedals—and ultimately, cars without human drivers inside.

But many people, including United States auto safety regulators and the automakers themselves, are betting that fully autonomous cars are the next big thing, and that the nation’s highways will be safer with more cars driven by machines and not people.

Around the world each day, 3,287 people die in automobile-related accidents.

In 2015, according to the National Safety Council, auto-related accidents caused nearly 40,000 deaths in the US, the highest number of automotive-related fatalities since 2008 and the largest year-over-year percentage increase in 50 years.

Addressing that shocking statistic, President Obama proposed early this year about $4 billion in the federal budget for driverless car research and development over the next 10 years.

Autonomous vehicles are a hotly contested field of technology, pursued by tech giants, promising upstarts and traditional automakers. All see the potential of self-driving cars to upend the automobile industry.

The booming industry of automated vehicles got another endorsement last September when the US Department of Transportation announced long-awaited guidelines with strong safety oversight, indicating that federal regulators see automated car technology as positive for auto safety.

Over-all, the government’s endorsement will speed up the rollout of autonomous cars, potentially within the next five years, experts said.

The rush to develop driverless car technology is premised on the belief that cars, which already have an array of collision avoidance systems, can be made even safer if fully autonomous.

In Britain, the Coalition Government announced support for trials of driverless cars as part of its 28-billion-pound road strategy.

Scientists in Oxford adapted a Nissan Leaf, an electric subcompact car, to enable it to run along a predetermined route, although the driver can regain control by tapping on the brake.

On Sept. 19, 2016,  Obama published an editorial in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette saying that self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year and that the government’s new policy is “flexible and designed to evolve with new advances.”

Google, the pioneer

Driverless and semi-autonomous cars have already hit the open roads in the US, requiring regulators to scramble to keep up. Since 2009, the self-driving cars of Google, the pioneer and early technological leader in the field, have logged 2.3 million driverless miles on test drives in California, Arizona, Texas and Washington State—the equivalent of more than 400 roundtrip drives from New York to Los Angeles.

This month, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced that its autonomous vehicle project was spinning off and would operate as a stand-alone company under the name Waymo.

It was a signal that Google’s self-driving technology has advanced beyond research project status and is ready for commercialization.

Waymo claims that it completed the world’s first fully driverless ride in Austin, Texas, with a blind passenger in a car without a steering wheel or pedals.

Google’s self-driving prototype car at the Google campus in Mountain View, California, does not have controls such as a steering wheel, a brake and an accelerator. The prototype is designed to be a low-speed vehicle that could perform taxi and possibly delivery functions in crowded urban settings.

In 2014, Google’s expanded program permitting some employees to commute using the autonomous cars resulted in the observation of distracting behavior, up to and including passengers falling asleep. This led Google to take the position that “the most dangerous thing on the roads is a human driver due to their driving distracted, driving while intoxicated, lack of compliance with the law and other issues,” a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology was quoted as saying.

Despite Google’s head start, however, other companies have incorporated autonomous driving technology into their products and services more quickly. Google needs to make money from self-driving cars, but unlike Uber, it does not have a ride-hailing service, and unlike Tesla or other automakers, it does not have an auto manufacturing background.

This year, Google reached a deal with Fiat Chrysler to equip its automated driving systems in 100 Pacifica minivans. Google insists that it is not in the business of making better cars, but it is in the business of making better drivers.

Equipping its driverless system on cars without steering wheels or pedals is Waymo’s ultimate goal, as Google believes that fully autonomous cars are safer than semi-autonomous vehicles, which may require a driver to take back control of the car without awareness of its surroundings.

Waymo says it doesn’t want humans to feel they need to monitor the vehicle, although government regulations currently require a vehicle to have steering wheel and pedals.

Tesla’s Autopilot

Tesla Motors, the electric carmaker, has a semi-autonomous Autopilot that can take over the driving for long stretches.

Tesla intends to start a ride-hailing service like Uber once its driverless car technology is ready, which could be as early as next year.

Last May, Tesla suffered a setback when a Tesla sedan driving on autopilot crashed into the side of a tractor trailer, killing the driver. After investigating the crash, Tesla said that neither the Autopilot nor the driver saw the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky since the Autopilot is designed to prevent rear-end collisions, not avoid vehicles crossing laterally.

Mobileye NV, the manufacturer of Autopilot, said that its systems will be able to see and react to lateral traffic beginning in 2018. But it split up with Tesla Motors after the fatal crash.

Uber’s trials

Uber, the ride-hailing giant, began trials in Pittsburgh last September, allowing its customers to order rides from driverless cars through their smartphone app.

With a person on standby in the driver’s seat and with cameras and GPS units mounted on the roofs, the self-driving Uber vehicles collect mapping data on plants and trees, the conditions of sidewalks, and traffic markings for nearly every street.

When the California Department of Motor Vehicles told Uber this mid-December that they should get a permit to continue fielding self-driving Ubers in San Francisco, the company relocated its fleet of autonomous Volvos to Arizona, where Governor Doug Ducey welcomed them with open arms.

Ducey, like Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, aspires to make his state a technical hub.  Eager to make Michigan “the epicenter of driverless car technology,” Snyder has passed laws to allow cars without drivers, or even steering wheels, onto open roads.

Growing list

At the same time, the list of companies competing in the automated vehicle technology race is growing.

Apple has hundreds of employees working on autonomous car technology, and competitors are snapping up tech talent.

Google, Intel, General Motors and Uber have hired dozens of computer science professors and graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University for their own research centers.

GM earlier this year acquired Cruise Automation Inc. to help accelerate its research, while Ford Motor Co. said it is investing in or teaming up with several tech companies to launch a car without steering wheel or pedals by 2021.

Volvo Car Corp. is launching a public test of autonomous vehicles in Sweden next year, and Nissan Motor Co. aims to launch rival systems by decade’s end.

Toyota’s research

On the other hand, uncertainty remains within the auto industry about whether autonomous car technology is advancing quickly enough to soon drive a car more safely than humans, and there is no consensus within the industry about the ultimate role of human drivers in the face of rapid progress in artificial intelligence technologies.

Toyota appears to be committed to developing autonomous systems that will not ultimately replace drivers.

In 2015, Toyota announced a $1-billion research project with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to focus on artificial intelligence that helps human drivers, rather than helps make vehicles fully autonomous.

However, driver assistance features like self-parking, lane keeping and self-steering on the highway are technologies meant to be stepping stones toward completely autonomous vehicles.

Aiming for 2021

Last July, BMW AG, chipmaker Intel Corp. and vision systems company Mobileye NV announced they were teaming up to bring fully automated cars to the road by 2021, starting with the BMW iNext.

The iNext, set to supplant the 7-Series as BMW’s flagship model, will be the foundation for the BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy and set the basis for fleets of fully autonomous vehicles, not only on highways but also in cities for the purpose of automated ride-sharing solutions like robo-taxis.

According to a consulting company, robo-taxis will make up 40 percent of automotive profits by 2030, more than selling vehicles to individuals.

BMW said the platform will be open for other carmakers and technology companies who could benefit from recent progress in artificial intelligence with autonomous machines and machine learning algorithms.

BMW AG, Intel and Mobileye are convinced that automated driving technologies will make travel safer and easier.  Their goal is to develop future-proofed solutions that enable the drivers to not only take their hands off the steering wheel, but reach the so-called “eyes off” (Level 3) and ultimately the “mind off” (Level 4), transforming the driver’s in-car time into leisure or work time.

This level of autonomy would enable the vehicle, on a technical level, to achieve the final stage of “driver off” (Level 5) without a human driver inside.

Affordable

Last August, Mobileye NV made another announcement, this time joining forces with auto parts supplier Delphi Automotive PLC, to develop the Central Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) platform that carmakers could place in their vehicles beginning in 2019.

Joined by Intel last month, Delphi and Mobileye hope that the partnership will develop the market’s first affordable turnkey Level 4/5 automated driving solution for rapid integration into diverse vehicle platforms ranging from small cars to SUVs and pickup trucks, thus helping them craft a central role in the race to supply technology for driverless cars.

Expect these amazing automated driving systems that process 24 trillion operations of computer power per second to be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next year.

—Sources: Bloomberg News, WSJ, INYT, techcrunch