It could happen to any of us. You’re driving down Interstate 75 when an accident occurs ahead of you. There’s limited time to react. You panic, slam on the brakes and attempt to veer right, not noticing that the SUV behind you is now beside you. You crash into it.
It’s a situation none of us wants to be in. One that in the foreseeable future could be a thing of the past, as highly automated and autonomous vehicles bring the most profound revolution the auto industry has experienced since Henry Ford’s introduction of the assembly line in 1913.
Autonomous vehicles that have the ability to drive themselves are no longer fiction. They’re a reality. Companies from Detroit to Silicon Valley are testing them, with plans to introduce advanced semi-autonomous/automated features in the next year or so, and autonomous cars and trucks ready for public use as early as five to 10 years from now.
“It’s no longer a question of how feasible it is,” says automotive expert Jean-Francois Tremblay, EY (formerly Ernst & Young) Automotive and Transportation lead for the Americas. “It’s how quickly can the ecosystem welcome those vehicles?”
That ecosystem, our world, includes a litany of legislative, legal, financial and cultural speed bumps that are slowing down the release of autonomous vehicles — for now.
Autonomous vehicles use intricate systems of radars, cameras, sensors and advanced LIDARs — laser radar that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light — to continuously provide data about the vehicle’s surroundings to processing systems with complex algorithms at speeds faster than our brains could ever possibly imagine.
Humans have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Autonomous vehicles sense and analyze thousands of different scenarios in seconds, determining possibilities of possibilities with advanced algorithms, or sets of rules to be followed in calculations and other problem-solving operations.
“The algorithms are taking all of the sensor input and are constantly making evaluations of the path the vehicle is on and the path that everything else it sees around the vehicle is on,” says Jeffrey Owens, Delphi Automotive’s chief technology officer and executive vice president. “It’s constantly making calculations and evaluations of what to do if ‘x,’ ‘y’ or ‘z’ happens.”
So instead of slamming on the brakes and hitting the SUV beside you in the aforementioned accident, an autonomous vehicle would have known the safest, most appropriate scenario would have been steering left, where the driver next to you noticed the accident prior to you and had slowed down, giving you room to safely move over and stop.
Sound complex? It is. But possible. Delphi just completed a cross-country trip in an autonomous retrofitted Audi Q5 SUV called “Roadrunner” from San Francisco to New York in nine days. The vehicle, Owens says, surpassed expectations and drove in autonomous mode for 99 percent of the nearly 3,400-mile trip.
“This car was really an opportunity to put all of that technology on a vehicle and then look at the systems integration,” he says. “The system’s integration is one of the most difficult pieces here.”
Testing, testing …
Delphi, a leading global auto supplier, isn’t a car manufacturer and doesn’t want to be. It used the trip to show off its own technologies and collect about three terabytes, or 3 million megabytes (enough storage for 750,000 four-minute songs), of data to analyze and learn about the best-use cases for all of the technologies it’s developing and supplying to automakers.
The goal? Reduce the cost of the technologies used for autonomous vehicles to help bring highly automated cars and trucks to the masses as soon as possible.
“We’re going to continue to refine each of the individual sensors and look at how you can trade off between different kinds of sensors to make them cost effective,” says Owens, whose company is working on its ninth-generation radar.
Delphi is one of the leaders in the development of autonomous vehicles, along with other suppliers like Continental Automotive (see Business Profile, page 22); automakers such as General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Mercedes-Benz; and tech giant Google Inc.
Google has been one of the most open about its autonomous vehicle development and testing since announcing its first prototype in 2010. The company most recently announced a new fleet of self-driving cars that will leave the test track this summer for real-world testing. Officials believe the vehicles could save thousands of lives a year.
“It’s not going to be introduced until it’s much safer than the alternative, just because of the way the expectations go for these kinds of technologies, but it’s definitely coming,” says Ray Kurzweil, American inventor, futurist and director of engineering at Google, during remarks at the SAE 2015 World Congress in Detroit. “The technology works.”
A staged approach
Autonomous vehicles from both Google and Delphi use extremely expensive LIDARs and other technologies that can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the price of a vehicle. Some of Google’s self-driving cars are reportedly equipped with upward of $150,000 of additional technologies — more than four times the amount an average consumer paid for a vehicle in 2014.
Safety and cost are the two main automotive issues, which is why industry experts believe autonomous vehicle technologies will be introduce in stages. It’s starting now with active safety and adaptive cruise control systems that can keep a vehicle a safe distance away from other cars, keep it in its lane, brake in case of an emergency and warn drivers of impending collisions and accidents.
Instead of using expensive LIDAR, some companies are looking to develop “highly automated” systems that keep drivers in the loop under certain conditions, but still offer autonomous driving features.
“We are not so much focused on adding more functionalities,” says Steffen Linkenbach, Continental’s NAFTA director of systems and technology. “Our focus is on the safety aspect.” The company is concentrating on “everything that is not visible” in the cars, including safety architecture and redundancies to ensure a malfunctioning system is supported by another system that can safely perform the same function.
Continental, with its North American headquarters in Auburn Hills, is on its second highly automated vehicle, a retrofitted Chrysler 300 sedan. It does not use LIDAR. It uses products that the German-based auto supplier is developing or offers.
Continental collected terabytes of data as the vehicle drove more than 25,000 miles on its own during cross-country trips in recent years. The company, like its competitor Delphi, sees itself as being a catalyst for the eventual move into autonomous vehicles.
On a daily basis, Continental drives its retrofitted Chrysler 300 on the roads of Southeast Michigan, modifying the algorithms to extend the features and functionality of the car. Continental’s roadmap is leading to fully automated driving — where the driver doesn’t need to monitor the system on highways — in 2025 (see sidebar, page 24).
“We will go in the direction of (full) automation, but we will still have different use cases when we have this full autonomy,” Linkenbach says. “On the highway, I am convinced we will be able to do this in the next 10 years. I’m not so convinced that we’ll be able to do fully autonomous in an urban environment in the next 10 years. You have a lot of uncertainties and situations there.”
Continental, Delphi and many others believe it could take decades for autonomous vehicles to be in numbers on roadways, but vehicles that have the ability to drive someone from Detroit to Florida on I-75 are on the horizon.
A number of automakers have announced plans to introduce vehicles with advanced cruise control systems that will not only keep you a safe distance away from the vehicle ahead of you — many even in rush hour — but will keep you in your lane while driving on the highway.
GM calls it “Super Cruise.” It’s set to debut in late 2016 on the 2017 Cadillac CT6. Tesla Motors Inc. calls it “autopilot.” The California-based electric vehicle manufacturer expects its technology to debut this year on its Model S. But no matter what the name, it’s a grand step toward autonomous vehicles from both technological and cultural acceptance standpoints.
The new systems basically utilize adaptive cruise control, braking and steering combined with radar, camera and sensor systems to keep a vehicle in its lane. Using GPS data, they work on highways, where there are fewer variables, including pedestrians, and safety concerns.
“For us, automated driving is going to move in a parallel path with advanced safety systems that make it more robust and show immediate benefits to people,” says John Wilkerson, TRW Automotive’s senior communications manager.
Livonia-based TRW Automotive, which was recently acquired by German auto supplier ZF, has been a leader in active safety solutions that are critical to highly automated and autonomous vehicles.
But experts have to be careful. In May, it was reported that four of the 50 or so self-driving cars being tested on public roadways in California had been involved in accidents. The news reports brought hoards of negative publicity, even though the cars — three owned by Google and one by Delphi — were in collisions caused by human error.
“It will get a lot of scrutiny,” says Owens, of Delphi, whose company’s vehicle was stationary when hit by another vehicle that hopped over a median. “You are going to have situations like that that are beyond a system to do anything about.”
The ambiguous term “connected car” is a phrase the automotive industry has played around with for years that’s now becoming better known to consumers. It’s essentially a vehicle that connects with you, your smartphone, the road, other vehicles, its manufacturer and itself to share data.
In May, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx at Delphi Labs @ Silicon Valley announced the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will move ahead of its public timetable for its proposal to require vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication devices in new vehicles, and it will work to accelerate testing necessary to ensure that V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) transmissions are free from radio interference.
While radars and other sensors are key to autonomous vehicles, connected cars with internet, antennas and cloud-based operating systems that can essentially communicate with one another are expected be a breakthrough for autonomous vehicles.
“The auto will be the 2.0 of connected vehicle strategy,” says EY’s Tremblay. “Version 1.0 is what we’re currently driving toward, with having vehicle technologies that allow a car to operate by itself and sense its surroundings without being connected to a network.”
The connected car combined with the highly automated vehicle makes it so a driver could get into his or her vehicle, put a destination in, select preferences and let the vehicle drive to that requested destination along the most-optimized route.
The connected car, however, also opens up a Pandora’s Box for automakers who know how to make quality cars and trucks but, as we’ve seen with infotainment systems, aren’t as quick to adapt to the changes and advancements in technologies, not to mention security and data-ownership issues.
That’s where technology companies come in. Infotainment systems and connected cars have allowed for more traditional software and technology companies to come into the automotive realm. Many, such as Hungarian navigation solutions provider NNG, which started out in gaming, have located in Metro Detroit to be close to auto suppliers and automakers.
“We needed a focal point for that activity,” says NNG Vice President of Business Development Jim Robnett inside the company’s new office in Birmingham, MI. “We wanted to bring the NNG story closer to the customers.”
Maneuvering the Speed Bumps
Besides safety and cost concerns, the foremost challenges for autonomous vehicles have nothing to do with the automotive industry. They’re driven by laws, regulations and liability issues.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in regulatory and legal,” says Michigan senior automotive adviser and Automotive Industry Office senior vice president Kevin Kerrigan, who was appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in November. “There are lots of questions that need to be worked out.”
A few basics: Who’s liable if a car driving autonomously gets into an accident? Or even worse, what if the vehicle’s computer analyzes every situation, makes the best choice and someone is still killed? Is the driver responsible? The auto company? A supplier that provided the steering or other parts? Or the software developer who made the algorithms?
It’s arguably a more complex situation than the autonomous vehicle itself. It’s why numerous federal regulators and local politicians have to look to pass laws and invest in testing areas and infrastructure to help companies work with public officials to find solutions.
“It’s not going to be a case where we can design something in Michigan, and when you drive across the border into Ohio it doesn’t work,” says Kerrigan, also known as Michigan’s “auto czar.” “It’s going to have to be an agreement across the board at a federal level, and in fact a global level.”
Michigan has been proactive when it comes to testing and developing autonomous vehicles. It is one of four states to pass laws that clearly allow for driverless car testing on public roads. State officials also have partnered with federal officials and supported projects such as Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor for city and connected car testing and Michigan Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) “connected corridor.”
Mcity is essentially a data-centric playground to test the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) capabilities of connected cars, which many believe is a must for fully autonomous vehicles.
The connected corridor represents a partnership with MDOT, General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and a University of Michigan consortium to deploy V2I communication technology-enabled corridors on more than 120 miles of Metro Detroit roadways.
“We’re committed to the autonomous and connected vehicle concept,” Gov. Snyder told thousands of engineers during opening remarks at the SAE 2015 World Congress. “We’re going to continue to do new things to move that along.”
There are more than 2,000 miles separating the Motor City and Silicon Valley. But in recent years, companies from both Michigan and California have been exchanging expertise and opening automotive offices in San Francisco and tech offices in Detroit.
It’s because tech companies such as Google, even with $66 billion in revenue, are great at technology but don’t have the expertise to develop and mass-produce vehicles. And auto companies such as Delphi, GM, Ford and Continental — all of which have offices in Silicon Valley — aren’t as versed in the technology side of things.
“It’s a very difficult space,” says Jeffrey Owens, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Delphi Automotive. “In some cases, it’s uncharted territory for the automotive industry or any industry.”
More than a dozen traditional automotive companies are present in Silicon Valley. “Different companies have different approaches,” says Steffen Linkenbach, Continental Corporation’s NAFTA director of systems and technology. “At the end of the day we don’t have to find a common approach; we need to find the most effective approach.”
A car is not a cell phone, and a cell phone is not a car. You can’t reboot your car going 70 miles per hour. That’s how recalls happen and consumers reject the technology, which is why technology and automotive companies partnering is key for the success of highly automated and autonomous vehicles.
GM has partnered with companies such as AT&T to provide 4G connectivity in its vehicles. Delphi teamed up with Ottomatika — a company started by Carnegie Mellon University focused on automating driving functions of automobiles and other transportation — for its autonomous vehicle. And it’s likely one of the reasons Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV CEO Sergio Marchionne is calling for an auto industry consolidation and has reportedly met with Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of having technology disruptors show up in the marketplace and change the paradigm,” Marchionne said during the company’s first quarter earnings call when discussing how the auto industry wastes too much capital. “If they show up and they are truly successful, with their cash piles and know-how, they could fundamentally hurt this industry.”
So far no companies have made major acquisition or joint venture announcements, but industry experts and others see it as inevitable.
“Many industries are going to pop up,” says renowned futurist Faith Popcorn, founder and CEO of New York-based marketing consulting firm BrainReserve. The consumer trends expert, who the New York Times has called “The Trend Oracle,” sees autonomous vehicles coming sooner than many, leading a revolution to customizable “mobile pods” that will essentially be “homes on wheels.”
“I think it’s absolutely going to reinvent the car industry,” she says. “It’s just going to change our whole concept of getting from here to there.”