Self Driving Vehicles
Self-driving vehicles’ mission to create safety on roads and to reduce road fatalities might have a long way to go as the technology is still under continuous development and innovation.
The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 simultaneously served as the world’s largest and most elaborate self-driving experiment. Toyota as the official sponsor of Tokyo 2020 donates a large share for this demonstration. The project itself is led by the Strategic Innovation Promotion Program in collaboration with the government and academia support. 80 self-driving vehicles in the forms of buses, minivans, SUVs, and sedans to drive between Haneda Airport to the Olympic Village and within the Olympic Village itself. You’ve probably seen one of these vehicles, the Toyota e-Palette, which was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2018. Here we’ll highlight the era of MaaS – Mobility as a Service.
ReportWire states that the global autonomous vehicle market was valued at USD 20.97 billion in 2020, and it is expected to reach USD 61. 93 billion (bigger than Indonesian cigarette industry of USD 45.61 billion) projecting a CAGR of 22.75%. The main driver behind autonomous driving vehicles is a mission to create safety on roads and to reduce road fatalities. According to the World Health Organization, road injury remains to be the top 10 causes of death in both lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries. The causes of traffic collisions involve human error. A benefit that comes along with it is that self-driving vehicles could also help people with disabilities or the elderly with their daily commute, especially with countries that have an aging population such as Japan.
Before we dive into the key leaders of this industry, let’s look at what the technology really is. In simple words, self-driving cars are cars with cameras to track all objects around it. For a car to qualify as a self-driving car, it should be able to navigate without human intervention to a predetermined destination safely through a combination of neural networks, image recognition systems, camera, radar, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). The system itself is called an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). There are 6 levels of automation for driverless cars—level 5 being the highest level to achieve full automation and where humans can just be passengers, and level 0 being the lowest with no automation. Currently, companies such as Tesla and Google are aiming to achieve level 4 and 5. However, industry experts believe that it is still 10 years away. A few current players of the industry with a Level 2 include Volvo Pilot Assist, Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, and Cadillac Super Cruise.
Cars use maps to navigate roads on their own. Thus, it would only be fitting for Google to hop on this trend as well, being the parent company of Google Maps. Google created a subsidiary called Waymo which started as Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009. Waymo’s autonomous driving technology itself is called the Waymo Driver, comprising hardware and software. The services that they are offering are an autonomous ride-hailing service (Waymo One) and autonomous trucking and local delivery solutions (Waymo Via). Waymo One is a partnership between Waymo and Lyft. A similar partnership happens in China, between Volvo Cars XC90 and DiDi Autonomous Driving.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics plays a part in Waymo’s development. They develop logic chips that will act as a “brain” to the vehicle, to collect and compute real-time data from autonomous cars with Google data centers. Samsung themselves recently released its Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) which mimics the human retina to rapidly adapt to changes in its surrounding environment. Honda is first amongst its competition to achieve a certified level 3 autonomous vehicle. It succeeded in developing a “Traffic Jam Pilot” system that can control acceleration, braking and steering under certain conditions.
Tesla’s Autopilot is a level 2 ADAS offered as an “extra” service as buyers purchase their Tesla cars. It's the most popular package of Full Self-Driving. F.S.D. is priced around $10,000. The technology itself has been one that is bringing the buzz to the industry, although it is currently catching safety regulator’s attention due to its incidents. Unlike Waymo, Tesla does not use three-dimensional maps for its navigation, similarly to how the human eye would witness as they are driving.
EHang 216
China’s Passenger Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV), EHang 216 is prepared to be distributed in Indonesia this year by Prestige Image Motorcars. As of September 2021, EHang 216 is going through several tests before receiving its flight permit.
Priced around USD 336 thousand, EHang 216 is intended to help human work especially in emergency situations. EHang 216 is already functioning as an Intelligent Aerial Firefighting Solution. Other than for public transportation and tourism, EHang 216 can also be used for medical evacuation, and short distance logistics.
Does it Really Work?
The current struggle with machines is they are unable to completely understand what is happening around them, to reason like a human, and thus predicting what will likely happen next. Such a factor is the root to the industry’s slow growth.
Although Elon Musk said Tesla on Autopilot is 10 times less likely to crash than the average cat, at least three Tesla drivers have died since 2016 due to Tesla’s Autopilot failures. The Autopilot failed to detect obstacles in the road. Two of these accidents are caused by the system’s failure to detect a tractor crossing highways and a concrete barrier in another.
The Future of Self Driving Cars
Despite several failure stories, the technology of self-driving cars is still under continuous development and innovation. But do we really need self-driving cars for personal use? Are we looking at the future of transportation?