Smart Industry 1/2018

Self-Driving Cars
Getting
There
Autonomous vehicles are disrupting traditional business models
within one of the world’s largest industries and it’s happening much
sooner than anyone expected. What are the forces behind the push for
self-driving cars? Is the necessary road infrastructure in place, or do we
still need to build it? What happens if an autonomous vehicle needs to make
life-or-death decisions? In this section we explore the possibilities – and the
risks – involved when humans hand over control to robo-chauffeurs.
■ By Tim Cole, Gerhard Kafka, and Marcel Weiss
Four years. That was the answer
given by Jensen Huang, CEO
of Nvidia, early last year when
he was asked how long it
would take for artificial intelligence
to enable fully automated cars. Then
a funny thing happened. Suddenly,
self-driving vehicles began to crop
up on public roads all over the place.
At the Barcelona Motor Show in May,
Audi unveiled the 2018 Audi A8, which
it claimed as the world’s first production
car to offer Level 3 autonomy. Level 3
means the driver doesn’t need to
supervise things at all, so long as the
car stays within certain guidelines. In
Audi’s case that means never driving
faster than 60 kph (37 mph). Audi billed
this feature as the AI Traffic Jam Pilot.
In the US, Las Vegas became the first
city in America to have a self-driving
shuttle operating in real-time traffic.
However, on its first day of service the
shuttle collided with a truck. The driverless
bus couldn't back off when the
truck was reversing into an alley so,
technically at least, the human driver
caused the crash, not the shuttle.
In September, General Motors showcased
the third generation of its
autonomous Chevrolet Bolt, which it
has developed with recently acquired
Cruise Automation, headquartered in
San Francisco. Kyle Vogt, the CEO of
Cruise Automation, called it the “first
production model self-driving car in
the world.”
The time of the self-driving vehicle has
come much faster than anyone expected.
For Jensen Huang and Nvidia
it means big bets are paying out
even sooner than they’d hoped.
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