Bridging the Gap: Autonomous Cars

Self-driving (or autonomous) cars have been portrayed in futuristic movies, covered in the media, and have faced much scrutiny in recent years. So what are autonomous cars? They are defines them as a vehicle that can guide itself without human conduction (Techopedia). A fully autonomous car might not be perfected or available to the market today and probably wont be for another decade, but they're coming alright. This concept might frighten people, especially after the autonomous Uber car incident in March 2018. Currently Google, GM, Volvo, and other companies are working on perfecting the fully autonomous car. however, even if these vehicles are safer than the average human driver, there will still be accidents until some sort of nationwide infrastructure for every car to communicate through is implemented. Elon Musk had an interesting opinion about this topic;

"The thing that's tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn't reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero. It improves it substantially... but the accidents that do happen with autonomous vehicles get a disproportionate amount of attention." (Elon Musk)

Link to full article: Tesla's Elon Musk

He has a great point, the negative news coverage would outweigh the positive and it would take even longer for the public to accept. So how do we bridge this gap and ease into the autonomous car world? Ask Audi, currently one of the leaders in self driving human support technology. Bits and pieces of this technology are seen in other car manufacturers, like self parking and auto-break capabilities, but Audi is redefining the gap between features and full autonomy. The 2019 Audi A8 has plenty of 3 star autonomous features such as driving in traffic under 35mph and the garage parking system which you can step out of the car and control with your smartphone. What Audi is trying to master is how the car executes the "handoff" that is alerting the driver to take the wheel. This has been more of a challenge than perfecting the auto-driving capabilities. In the A8, engineers are fine tuning these features. Currently the car watches the driver using facial recognition and has steering wheel touch sensory, if there is inactivity the car will use visual and audio alerts as well as pump the breaks until the driver is attentive. If this doesn't work the car will turn on the hazard lights, slowly break, and pull over safely.

Audi A8 2019:

This model is arriving in late 2018 and will be available for just over $100,000. Since this is an expensive luxury vehicle, it wont make a huge impact until other manufacturers begin to adopt these capabilities and make them more cost effective. Alex Davies from Wired says "The A8 hasn’t proven itself yet, and Audi will never sell enough of the executive-­toting sedans to make much of a dent in traffic fatalities. But its human-­centered focus can serve as a model for other companies."(Davies)
Before we can put fully driving, point A to point B cars, there must be transition, especially for human safety. This innovation can help bridge the gap between human and fully autonomous vehicles, creating an advancing, yet safer world.


Link to Audi Article: Wired