Many have their doubts over driverless cars becoming a reality. Are they right in …?
… Thinking that the autonomous technology is flawless and has evolved into an adoptable state. Or there are actually flaws in the technology after all? Let’s have a look.
For now, the driverless technology isn’t good enough
On today’s cars, we can find the handful of semi-autonomous technologies like the lane keeping, self-parking, emergency braking and cruise control, and they are pretty helpful too. On German motorways, Daimler is testing the self-driving Lorries while Ford is about to introduce automatic speed limit recognition technology.
But from full autonomy, it still is a far cry. The radars may work on short ranges but for greater distances, they struggle, said Andy Whydell, director at TRW, one of the largest global engineering companies. Their speciality is in driver safety equipment.
The lasers and cameras have limitations of their own, they can’t work effectively in rainy, foggy or snowy conditions. So they aren’t reliable enough.
Now take the sensors, they also lack range, if the vehicle is at high speed, they can’t react fast enough. Their range is 400m maximum, but the work is still on to increase it.
And the biggest problem they’ll be facing is to cross a T-junction in rush hour when the human drivers won’t give them way.
Standard for vehicle-to-vehicle communication
The auto industry will be facing the biggest challenge to agree upon some sort of technological standard for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. To communicate directly with each other, the driverless cars will be needing some sort of communication system, maybe similar to the transponders used in the aeroplane to transmit location, speed and direction.
So you see, standardisation on the driverless cars will be the biggest challenge, as when you consider the data analytics, it needs to be shared across the industry. And for that, an open source software will be needed in the cars.
