Cadillac promises self-driving cars by 2015

Self-driving cars this decade? Could be. Super Cruise, a suite of General Motors technologies that lets a car drive itself on some roads, could be ready by the middle of the decade, Cadillac says. It’s now 2012, so that means as little as three or four years from now. This is, GM suggests, a Cadillac that “is capable of fully automatic steering, braking and lane-centering in highway driving under certain optimal conditions.” It uses adaptive cruise control and lane-centering technologies that rely on an array of radar, ultrasononic and camera sensors, plus precise GPS map data.

General Motors’ press release has lots of qualifiers. The bottom line is that GM believes it can unleash a self-driving car that works, under optimal conditions, in a couple years. It appears that GM means on limited access roads with clearly defined lane markers, but also in crowded stop-and-go traffic, not just on wide-open rural interstates. A driver would still be behind the wheel ready to take over in case of a problem such as lane markings that disappear, rain or snow blocking the sensors, or possibly another car swerving across lanes so quickly they might confuse the array of sensors.

According to GM, the car would steer via enhanced lane departure warning (LDW) systems. BasicLDW systems beep or vibrate when the car crosses a lane marking, lane keep assist systems available now try to nudge the car back into lane though electric power steering or by light braking of one front wheel (it turns the car in that direction), while a self-driving car would proactively center the car, rather than bounce the car off the lane markings like a game of pong played with 4,000 pound icons.

What goes into the Caddy that zigs, and zags, without going off-road? GM lists these technologies as the building blocks of Super Cruise. Some substitutes could be used, for instance GM’s safety alert seat that buzzes on the side of the hazard, could be a vibrating steering wheel or even the annoying audio alerts used by some blind spot or lane departure systems.

• Full-speed range adaptive cruise control
• Lane departure warning
• Side blind zone alert
• Intelligent brake assist
• Forward collision alert
• Safety alert seat
• Automatic collision preparation
• Rear cross traffic alert
• Rear automatic braking
• Adaptive forward lighting (steerable headlamps)
• Rear vision camera with dynamic guidelines
• Head-up display (HUD)
• GPS map data

How much would Smart Cruise cost? GM and Ford have been world-class in driving down expenses and if it’s embedded as a single safety package it would carry a lower markup than individual options, which are more lucrative. The combination of technologies, projected ahead 3-5 years, would probably cost $5,000-$10,000. The single most expensive component is adaptive cruise control. The industry leader is Ford, with ACC priced at $1,000 now, but it only works down to 20 mph. Full-range ACC on high-end German and Japanese cars is $2,500-$3,000 and needs a second radar for close-distance work (i.e. for speeds under 20 mph) but it might be possible to swap in laser or ultrasound at lower cost. Assuming it arrives on a higher-end Cadillac, the cost-adder would be 10%-20% of the selling price.

GM says the sum of the all the technologies working together is what it calls “sensor fusion.” Gillette would call that “our last couple of razors.” Google, who is very publicly working on its own self-driving cars, so far straps all of the sensors onto the roof of the car (pictured above). It’s safe to assume that the sensors would be integrated into the car once it reaches full-scale production, however.

The insurance industry is yet to be heard from. The insurance industry freaks out at anything new and different because of its concerns for the safety of the insured, as well as to avoid unnecessary payouts. RelayRides, a car-sharing project that earns owners money for renting their cars out, is at odds with insurance companies who’ve threatened to cancel policies if owners rent out their cars — even when RelayRides says it will cover accident damage. (But only up to $1 million, the insurers note.)

Read more at GM

Source

Nevada embraces the future, approves self-driving cars

The state that makes its livelihood off gambling is making a safe bet that self-driving cars won’t cause mayhem on the highways of Nevada. The Silver State just set up rules for driverless cars after the legislature approved the concept last year. Among the rules: Self-driving cars get red license plates in Nevada if they’re test vehicles, and there still has to be a driver behind the wheel. Right now it’s a pro-business move, to entice automakers to test autonomous driving vehicles in wide-open Nevada as they already do for mainstream cars. Down the road, the rules will be in place when they go on sale to the public.

How safe are self-driving cars? Google wants to rack up 1 million test miles, and so far its fleet of cars has suffered one fender-bender accident, and that was with the self-driving car under the control of a human.

Since 2000, the idea of a self-driving car has gone from never, to maybe-in-our-lifetime, to end-of-the-decade. Sensor technology is moving ahead at a Moore’s law pace. It picked up steam when newcomers (Google) got in the game played previously by automakers and a handful of research universities (Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon as the main players, along with Cornell, MIT, and Virginia Tech).

Even now, passenger cars have enough technology to be self-driving on non-twisty rural interstates by combining adaptive cruise control (ACC) that paces you with the car in front and slows or stops when it does, and lane keep assist (LKA) or lane departure warning that watches via a single on-board camera to see if you’re centered between the lane markings and steers you back into lane if you let the car drift. Automakers that have both are adding features to keep you from trying to make the car self-driving, typically by looking for the constant small corrections a driver makes even when driving along an arrow-straight road. If there are none and the driver is probably trying to create a self-driving car ahead of its time, the car turns off lane keep assist and beeps to say, “Bad boy.”

Cars sold as self-driving would have to be an order of magnitude more complex than ACC-LKA cars, with multiple cameras, radars and sensors to help negotiate curves, sense traffic lights, and avoid cars cutting in front. But they’ve come a long way from the early DARPA challenges when they were stalling, crashing, and mostly getting overwhelmed in simple desert settings. Now a self-driving Audi TT (pictured above) has climbed Pikes Peak and dealt with negative obstacles, such as a cliff with no guardrail. It’s hard for sensors to register something that’s not there. The direction of self-driving cars is that they’re autonomous. The idea of them being guided by sensors in the roadbed is pretty much ancient history.

Warm weather states such as Nevada and Arizona are popular for testing because test drivers encounter less traffic and potentially fewer spy photographers. The wide-open states have also attracted individuals doing private testing at super-legal speeds, much to the annoyance of authorities.

Source