Driverless car technology is emerging

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Driverless cars aren’t just the fiction of movies like Total Recall or Minority Report anymore. The technology is emerging faster and faster.

It seems as if Google was thinking about some of the rural areas of Clark County when it patented the answer to the question, what happens when a driverless car is presented with a cow or two in the roadway?

The patent offers a system that would allow the car to detect when it is either approaching livestock or even struck by a deer jumping in its path. The question is for this technology, how it tells if it is behind something immovable or just a temporary setback.

The bigger questions are, what exactly are self-driving cars, are they viable and if so, how soon? They are actually more real than many people may think.

Just this month, an Audi SQ5 equipped with parts supplied by Delphi, an auto parts maker, completed a cross-country, 3,400 mile trip and 99 percent of the trip was done with the car in an automated mode. The Audi started in San Francisco and ended in Manhattan.

A Delphi statement read, “Along the way, the vehicle encountered complex driving situations such as traffic circles, construction zones, bridges, tunnels, aggressive drivers and a variety of weather conditions.”

State regulations at this point require a driver to be behind the wheel to be available to override the car if needed to avoid a pedestrian or vehicle.

Audi hasn’t been limited to this trip. It recently tested the RS7 Piloted Driving Concept vehicle at a racetrack in Germany and hit a top speed of 140 mph. White exciting, Audi engineers stressed that it was for more than just fun. They said driverless vehicles will be required to make rapid changes in direction and sometimes at high speeds. Tests like these are necessary to gauge the reliability at those speeds.

There are a couple of different classifications of driverless or autonomous cars. There is currently technology in production vehicles that can override a driver’s negligence or inattention to avoid an accident. Some vehicles have lane avoidance features that physically correct a driver that has gone over the lines and others will set the brakes at slower speeds if the driver fails to do so. A number of vehicles also already have self-parking features.

The National Highway Safety Administration has proposed a classification system to grade the vehicles.

• Level 0: The driver completely controls the vehicle



• Level 1: Individual vehicle controls are automated, such as electronic stability control or the automatic braking.

• Level 2: At least two controls can be automated in unison, such as adaptive cruise control combined with lane keeping.

• Level 3: The driver can fully cede control of all safety-critical functions in certain conditions. The car has the ability to sense and determine if the driver needs to take over control.

• Level 4: The vehicle would control the entire trip and the driver would simply be a passenger. The vehicle would control all functions including parking.

To use a glaringly dated term, the cart may be before the horse on this technology. A 2014 study by Insurance.com showed that more than three quarters of licensed drivers would consider a driverless car to purchase and that number went up to 86 percent if insurance rates were cheaper. All this excitement is great but with such a disruptive force facing the roadways, more questions than answers are out there now.

In a Washington Post article on the SXSW Interactive Festival, it reported some interesting comments from venture capitalist, Bill Gurley (an early investor in Uber). He was talking about the imperfect network of cars.

Humans will be much less tolerant of a machine error causing death,” said Gurley.

Despite his aggressive stance on disruptive technology, he is much more skeptical than most on the driverless vehicles. He said the cars would have to be 99.99 percent or a near perfect safety record.

The obstacles are certainly many and it is possible they may just be too much to overcome for wide spread acceptance. As the recent massive Takata Air Bag recall has proven, a car and its components are far from perfect. Another issue is the concern a car’s commuter could be compromised, and like a good James Bond movie, mayhem could ensue.

Even with all the obstacles, the energy and excitement about one day riding in your car along the Sunset Highway and watching the latest Game of Thrones episode on your 4G wifi equipped car rather than driving for an hour seems like something the marketplace will demand.

Ridgefield resident Brad Boyer is owner of Carcierge and co-host of Test Miles radio KXL 101.1 FM in Portland. For more information, go to www.carcierge.net or www.bradthecarguy.com.