Manually driven cars may even be outlawed or restricted to closed circuits. Technology research firm Vision Systems Intelligence listed all the companies that provide solutions for or drive autonomous technologies the amount of companies is impressive. More than 200 companies work on autonomous driving solutions and - if we extrapolate trends from other hot industries - many more will follow. Additionally required sensors such as Lidar are predicted to drop to a few hundred dollars in the next few years. Modern cars are equipped with hundreds of sensors, including radar, cameras, GPS and accelerometers. Sensor technologies are also advancing rapidly, and prices are dropping. This system standard is expected to be included by 2020 in the cars built by its partners, including BMW, Ford, GM, Daimler, Volkswagen and Volvo. Other playersĪUTOSAR, an automotive system architecture for standardizing automotive electronic control units, is expected to have in its 2018 release version 4.4 everything included for autonomous driving. Conservative expectations that draw from past linear experiences may be coming faster than most of us expect through the exponential component.
Singularity plays outįollowing Ray Kurzweil’s statement on Singularity, we will see exponential acceleration in the development of the required digital power and intelligence of self-driving car AI. Additionally, announcements involving BMW revealed that the focus of their i-series is shifting to autonomous vehicles the release to the market is expected in 2021. Even suppliers like Bosch got test licenses. Honda, Mercedes, Audi, Ford and GM all have test vehicles and are frantically acquiring technology or entering into partnerships like GM and Fiat. Traditional automakers who’ve been asleep at the wheel for some time are now ramping up their efforts with the goal to catch up with those newcomers from the digital industries. The cars had an incident every 133,000 miles this is on par with reported and non-reported human accidents with property damage.
Given the overall number of miles driven and comparing them with the number of accidents, the cars are already as safe as human drivers: 12 accidents occurred with Google vehicles during the 1.6 million miles of road tests, and only two of them were the fault of the Google cars. Uber and Baidu are just two more digital companies that started testing autonomous cars. And Elon Musk recently announced that Tesla is less than two years away from having a complete autonomous car. Tesla, on the other hand, revealed that their customers have driven more than 100 million miles in Autopilot mode since its roll-out in October last year. Added to that are 3 million simulated miles every day, according to Google’s January report. In total, this counts for 90 percent of all test miles driven in California. Google has accumulated an impressive 1.6 million autonomously driven miles, adding between 10,000 and 15,000 miles every week. Google alone has 58 test vehicles on roads across the U.S., counting for 80 percent of all registered test cars. The California DMV alone issued to 13 companies licenses for road testing autonomous technologies.
But one thing is certain: The last person to get a driver license is already born - the speed of technology development and recent announcements confirm that. This person may live right around the corner in your neighborhood. I admit: I don’t know if Liam will be the last person to get a driver license. Not only is he a cutie, he is the last person to get a driver license. He recently celebrated his first birthday. Mario Herger is the CEO of consultancy firm Enterprise Garage.