There are tremendous efforts underway to develop and deploy automated driving systems. An ADS is a complex computer and mechanical system that gathers information from the environment; filters and interprets that information; chooses driving operations; and initiates mechanical actions to perform those driving operations. Many ADS developers are actively engaged today in developing vehicles in which some of the dynamic driving tasks of the vehicle – the real-time operational and tactical functions required to operate a vehicle – can only be controlled by the ADS of the vehicle. The Society of Automotive Engineers has created categories of automated driving levels that is widely accepted today.

Today, and possibly for a long time to come, the full driving task – SAE Levels 4 and 5 – is too complex an activity to be fully formalized as a sensing-acting robotics system that can be explicitly solved through model-based and learning-based approaches in order to achieve full unconstrained vehicle autonomy.

  • “Ford had overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles. At best, we can expect a driverless vehicle that operates within a small, geographically restricted area of a city, like a bus crawling back and forth in a restricted lane at an airport. Anything more is out of the question.” Jim Hackett, Ford CEO
  • The technology won’t be ubiquitous for decades and driverless vehicles will always have constraints. Self-driving cars will require driver assistance for many years to come. Can’t envision a day when the technology operates in all weather conditions and without some sort of “user interaction.” John Krafcik, Waymo CEO
  • “Level 5 will never happen globally. This will only be the case in very few cities.” Thomas Sedran, VW CEO
  • “The driver can’t come out of cars for many years, if not more than a decade.” Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley

A primary impediment to the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles is their mind-boggling complexity and risk, starting with an extremely large amount of computer coding necessary for these vehicles. “[L]et’s next look at the average number of defects per 1,000 lines of code, for which there is ample data in various analyst reports: we see up to 50 defects, thereof about ten critical defects, per 1,000 lines of code. Even if only 1% of these were to impact cyber security, our AV would hit the road with an estimated 30,000 cyber defects hidden in its software guts.”2

Resource Details

Publish Date

January 8, 2020

Topics

  • Auto Insurance
  • Autonomous Vehicles