Frankfurt Car Show: Going tech crazy in drive for more sales
Active Speed Limiter is available on select models in Europe, but not, ironically, in the US, 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.
Carmakers 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 judgements.
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 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 Continental, Israel’s Mobileye Vision Technologies (IPO-MOBV.O), and consumer-technology giants Google, Apple, Samsung Electronics, Sony, and more.
At Silicon Valley’s Nvidia Corp, for example, video games remain the biggest market, but car revenue is the fastest-growing segment.
“We’re in well over 8m cars on the road today and will be in more than 30m 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.”
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, Hyundai, 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. 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 minimise the possibility of people doing crazy things with it.”
For consumers, getting their first car with semi-automated features can be both exciting and daunting, especially those who have not bought a new car in years. 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 “relearning 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.
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 €350 in Europe.
BMW’s new flagship 7 Series saloon has a remote 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, 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 firm’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 auto- motive as well as athletic competition, and not just among traditional car firms.
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.
