Do all EVs come with autonomous driving capabilities?
Sort of, yes. Then again, pretty much every new car comes with autonomous driving capabilities, so to speak. We’re fudging our words here because technically the answer is also no – no EV or combustion car currently has autonomous driving capabilities, depending on how you define that phrase.
To some people, autonomous driving capabilities means a car that can entirely, and without human intervention, drive itself along the public road. When it comes to this, we need to be crystal clear – there is no current production car that you can buy that is capable of doing this. It certainly seems there are still some car buyers, notably but not exclusively Tesla buyers, who have swallowed the entirely unjustified hype, and dangerously inaccurate naming, of full self-driving. Again, to be clear – there is no current production car that you can buy, Teslas included, that can drive itself.
There are, however, some prototypes and limited production “robotaxis” in use in some parts of the world that can in theory drive themselves, but these are not cars you can actually buy in a dealership – they’re effectively experimental vehicles that are being tested in public.
Hang on though, at the top you said ‘sort of, yes’. So were you lying?
No, we weren’t but there are systems in cars, currently, that are at least the beginnings of autonomous tech. Technically, they’re better known by the acronym ADAS, or automated driver assistance systems, which is a far better way of describing them than “autonomous” because they’re not autonomous at all – they can simply step in to help a driver, or help prevent an accident, or at least reduce the severity of an accident. There are lots of these systems, and they’re already common on many, even most, new cars.
Systems such as adaptive cruise control, which uses radar to keep you a safe distance from the car in front on the motorway or a dual carriageway; lane-keeping assistance, which uses cameras to see where the lines on the road are, and which can apply a little bit of effort to the steering to help you stay in your lane; and automated emergency braking systems, which use a combination of cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to detect a hazard in the road ahead – a car that’s carried out an emergency stop, a pedestrian stepping off the kerb without looking, or a cyclist veering in front of you – and which can slam hard on the brakes either to avoid a collision entirely, or at least make it a smaller collision, one less likely to cause death or injury.
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So the technology is there?
All of these system could, in theory, be tied together with other, more sophisticated sensors and software to create a car that can drive itself. But it hasn’t happened yet, at least not at a point where you can go to your local car dealer and buy one. The sensors themselves are expensive for a start, and the software needed to be able to make driving and control decisions fast enough and reliably enough is (a) also really expensive and (b) doesn’t really exist yet, at least not in a sense that your car could drive everywhere on its own.
Indeed, many carmakers are actually starting to back away from fully-autonomous driving tech, preferring to concentrate on systems that can hep a human driver, but which aren’t there to take complete control. Polestar – which is of course a company spun off from Volvo, and therefore has safety deep in its DNA – has recently said it won’t offer autonomous driving systems until it is absolutely certainty that they can perform better than a skilled human driver.
Equally, Renault has said that it cannot see – in the immediate future – a time when autonomous tech becomes affordable enough to offer to consumers in a broad sense. The French carmaker recently had a fully-autonomous bus service operating at the French Open Tennis event, taking spectators from a car park to the Roland Garros Stadium and back, but Renault’s engineers reckon that this kind of autonomous public transport system is a much better fit for the technology than trying to offer it in passenger cars.
So will we get fully autonomous cars soon or not?
Put it this way – Dr Steve Chien is the technical group supervisor of the artificial intelligence group (and, to give him his complete title, senior research scientist in the mission planning and execution section) at Nasa’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. That’s right, the same Nasa and the same JPL that launches deep-space probes, and Dr Chien is the guy in charge of coming up with artificial intelligence systems so that those probes can work things out for themselves and don’t have to spend hours waiting for a signal to reach Earth and a reply to be sent when something unexpected comes up. And what does Dr Chien reckon about autonomous cars?
“I would actually say that making a self-driving car and navigating around the streets of, say, Dublin, is quite a bit more challenging than an autonomous space craft. They are challenging in different ways,” said Dr Chien. “So the space craft is more challenging because the environment is somewhat unknown. If we send a space craft to Europa, we’re going there because we know very little about it. But we’re fairly certain that it won’t have to deal with the variables of a bunch of crazy people driving about on the street, dealing with rain. For instance, where I’m from in Los Angeles, when it rains it’s crazy because people aren’t used to the rain. When I first moved there, and I’m from the mid-west, where it rains all the time, I said these Californians were crazy; they don’t know how to drive in the rain. And now I’m one of them…”
So, the answer to the question is: no, no EV, nor any other car, currently has autonomous capabilities. Pretty much every new car has technology that’s related to autonomous capabilities, but every car on sale right now, even the most expensive and sophisticated ones, and especially Teslas, all need a human being – and an attentive and skilled one at that – in the driver’s seat.
