Self-driving technology that comes to your personal owned vehicles
Waymo & Toyota have announced a partnership to jointly develop an autonomous vehicle platform with the aim of integrating Waymo’s autonomous driving technology into Toyota’s POV.
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- Hands-free systems like General Motors’ Super Cruise are expected to continue to lead the technology available for years.
- Super Cruise was released in 2017.
- New autonomous driving forecasts from the telemetry project show that 16 million level 4 vehicles will be deployed each year by 2035.
Automotive experts say that despite the continued improvement and expansion of U.S. vehicles, don’t expect fully autonomous vehicles to be quickly becoming widespread in all conditions.
In fact, the most advanced technology called Level 5, which has no expectations for humans to control the vehicle, is not at all predicted in the next decade. That doesn’t mean that technology is stalling as automakers continue to deploy sophisticated driver assistance technologies in more and more vehicles.
This is a message from an automotive expert at Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research at Telemetry.
In a discussion with the Automotive Press Association in Detroit on Monday, September 29, Abuelsamid said handoff systems such as General Motors Super Cruise will continue to lead the technology deployed for the remainder of the decade. So-called eye-off technology poses greater risks and challenges for automakers, he noted.
Regarding Super Cruise, which launched in 2017 as the first hands-free system, Abuelsamid said there are many advances in the latest version.
In particular, GM plans to double its fleet of Super-Cruise-enabled vehicles to 720,000, and is planning on “technology to operate 750,000 miles of US and Canada roads by the end of this year,” according to a preliminary report from Detroit Free Press, part of the USA Today Network.
“These systems have significantly improved capabilities,” Abuelsamid says that even if they remain limited, Abuelsamid says there is a transition to more autonomy. Abuelsamid said they should start looking at consumer cars offering automated highway driving in the late 2020s.
He said by 2035, more than 16 million level 4 vehicles, self-driving vehicles with certain restrictions on operation, will be deployed annually around the world, with nearly 10 million in China.
This includes almost 12 million Robotaxis and shuttles, 2 million delivery vehicles and 2.4 million personal vehicles. Currently, Waymo’s self-driving cars run in many US cities, including Phoenix and San Francisco, are considered level 4.
However, it is worth noting, he said, that completely hands-free technology is not currently legally permitted in China. Abuel el amide pointed to new regulations imposed on China’s advanced driver assistance system after three people died in the crash in April. The country bans “beta testing” on public roads and certain features such as remote samanthus and parking, and does not allow certain conditions to be used for marketing, such as “autonomous driving.”
Eric D. Lawrence is a senior car culture reporter for the Detroit Free Press. If you have any tips or suggestions, please contact elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Send a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.
