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 Active Speed Limiter is available on select models in Europe, but
not, ironically, in the United States, Ford's home country, where
road signs come in different shapes and sizes, and are often
obscured by shrubbery.
So it goes on the road to the self-driving, or autonomous, car - a
journey of, well, stops and starts that most experts say will take a
couple decades to complete.
Meantime, advances in "semi-autonomy" - features that help handle
tricky or tiresome driving situations but still require a driver's
oversight - have sparked a high-tech automotive arms race, with car
companies vying to launch the most advanced features.
Automakers hope semi-autonomous features will, over time, help
drivers and regulators get over fears of riding in vehicles that
accelerate, steer and stop themselves, making potentially
life-or-death judgments.
Shorter term, car companies want these features to make driving more
convenient - and cars more profitable.
"People like features that make driving easier, safer and more fun,"
says Joseph Vitale Jr., who heads global automotive consulting for
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. "The question is what customers will pay
for them."
Ford's Active Speed Limiter comes at 560 euros ($602.78), and it's
too soon to tell how popular it will be.
Among the biggest winners for now are the companies that produce
electronic sensors, cameras and software that make self-driving
features possible.
The growing list includes the high-tech units of traditional
automotive suppliers such as Germany's Continental AG, Israel's
Mobileye Vision Technologies, and consumer-technology giants Google,
Apple, Samsung Electronics Co, Sony Corp and more.
At Silicon Valley's Nvidia Corp, for example, video games remain the
biggest market, but automotive revenue is the fastest-growing
segment.
"We're in well over 8 million cars on the road today and will be in
more than 30 million in the next three to four years," says Jen-Hsun
Huang, Nvidia's president and CEO. "Future cars will sense and
understand the world moving around them."
"DOING CRAZY THINGS"
A big step in that direction was the traffic-jam assistance feature
on the 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Now available on more Mercedes
models, the Intelligent Drive system allows the car to drive itself
at low speeds in traffic jams, freeing the driver from constant
braking.
BMW, Honda Motor Co, Hyundai Motor Co and others have or will soon
introduce similar features.
Silicon Valley's Tesla Motors recently broke new ground by
downloading "autopilot" features to its newer models, just as
software updates are downloaded to smartphones and tablets.
Autopilot basically drives the car itself, but Tesla warns drivers
not to relinquish control entirely.
On a recent investor call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he had seen some
"fairly crazy videos on YouTube" of Tesla owners driving hands-free
with autopilot, and added: "This is not good. We will be putting
some additional constraints on when autopilot can be activated, to
minimize the possibility of people doing crazy things with it."
BELLS AND WHISTLES
For consumers, getting their first car with semi-automated features
can be both exciting and daunting, especially those who haven't
bought a new car in years.
"I had no idea this sort of thing was out there," says Mark
Goldsmith, a Tokyo-area TV news writer. "I'd been driving a
15-year-old Jeep, which only had cruise control that you constantly
had to adjust, so all these new features are a novelty."
Goldsmith recently traded the Jeep for a 2015 Volvo [GEELY.UL] with
a mouthful of a name - the V40 T5 R-design - and a handful of
semi-automated driving features.
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Those include adaptive cruise control, distance warning, blind-spot
information system, "city safety," driver alert system, lane-keeping
aid, road-sign information, anti-skid system and parking assist.
Combined they add close to $1,000 to the car's total price of nearly
$31,000.
While Goldsmith says he has yet to test all the automated features,
he says the suite of functions was "definitely" a factor that helped
sell he and his wife on the car.
But to other drivers, like Kirstin Houser, a communications and
events manager in Frankfurt, mastering how to use all the buttons,
switches and toggles to activate the automated drive functions on
her family car, a 2015 Mercedes E-Klasse Kombi, was a time-consuming
process which required "relearn(ing) how to drive".
"There are just too many bells and whistles on the steering column,
either to push, pull, scroll, hold down, release, etc. By the time I
remember which one to use, there's already a row of cars behind me
honking to park my car," she said.
"Safe driving, and also understanding the general mechanics of a
car, are so engrained in the way we drive that it's hard to separate
that and allow our car to make those judgments."
TARGET 2020
Ford recently added automated straight-in, "perpendicular" parking
on some models. While developing the feature, company engineers
found that cars could self-park in places so tight that drivers
couldn't pull out of them. They reworked the software to add
pull-out capability to Active Park Assist, which is priced at $395
in America and 350 euros in Europe.
BMW's new flagship 7 Series sedan has a remote self-parking feature
that allows the car to park itself with nobody inside. Drivers stop,
hop out, push a button on the key fob, and the car takes over.
Google is holding discussions with at least half a dozen car
companies with aims of launching its self-driving car system by
2020. That same year, Japan's Big Three - Toyota, Nissan Motor Co
and Honda - are targeting the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games to launch
and showcase cars that will largely handle themselves in city
traffic, but not entirely.
"We maintain our expectation that drivers will remain in control of
their cars in 2020," Moritaka Yoshida, Toyota's chief safety
technology officer, said recently at a demonstration of the
company's latest automated driving technology.
Nonetheless, the company's Lexus GS450 SX models equipped with
cameras, radar and laser sensors changed lanes and merged smoothly
in heavy traffic, without help from the driver.
The 2020 Olympics could become a venue for automotive as well as
athletic competition, and not just among traditional car companies.
Tokyo-based Robot Taxi plans to bypass semi-autonomy and deploy
3,000 self-driving taxis that athletes, VIPs and tourists can summon
by a smartphone app to ferry to and from venues.
"It's not about the car," the company's chairman Hisashi Taniguchi
told Reuters. "We're going to generate revenue from supplying
self-driving vehicles as a service, and collecting user fees. It's
all about the app, and how many people use it."
($1 = 0.9290 euros)($1 = 122.9700 yen)
(Reporting by Paul Ingrassia and Naomi Tajitsu; Editing by Ian
Geoghegan)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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