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Autonomous & Connected Cars

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November 2013, A discussion on autonomous and connected vehicles was a highlight panel at the Connected Car Expo at the LA Auto Show. The panel, moderated by Joseph White of the Wall Street Journal, and featured Ron Medford of Google, Jeff Klei of Continental, and Sven Beiker of Stanford. The panel started with the question of IF autonomous vehicles would be a reality in the marketplace. The consensus, was it is not an IF question anymore, it is a WHEN question.

The issue as outlined by Google is the creation of the infrastructure for the self-driving car. This includes connectivity at certain times, status and conditions of the roads, insurance policies and regulations to support them, drivers training on how and when to trust the car and when they need to assist, energy consumption (gas stations and charging station selection and choice of use), and crisis management (e.g. 911 connectivity). These issues are in existence as an overriding factor to the technical problems and solutions. The tech is being addressed and can be solved a piece at a time.

In 1999 Mercedes rolled out the first major step in the autonomous car tech which was the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) which operates both acceleration and brakes for keeping a fixed distance from adjacent traffic. There have been other advances since that have the self driving car on the time frame of:
2016 partially automated - primarily safety and low speed functions
2020 advance automation
2025 fully automated cars with cloud processing and connectivity.

The discussion then moved to “where will they be used?”. This discussion covered - should it launched and used in heavily populated dense traffic, unpopulated areas only, high speed vs congested freeways & roads, and under what conditions should the tradeoff be between the use of human driver and the automation (weather, traffic, distance, etc). These issues are complex and the answers may vary from region to region. The good thing about the path to the self driving car, is the technical development and the solutions to these problems are independent. The availability of full automation capability in the car does not require its constant use, and it also does not require a 100% real time connection to the cloud.

This connectivity is a key item. While the cloud is a great resource, it is not practical to connect all cars to the cloud on a 100% duty cycle. The cloud infrastructure cannot manage the full extent of the telemetry data from all the cars in addition to the in-cabin infotainment bandwidth.

Systems like On-Star are addressing the non-real time aspects of the connected car with thier current product. It uses a free app for iOS/Android that allows for directions found on a computer or phone to downloaded into the car for either turn-by-turn directions or into the navigation system. This is in addition to MapQuest integration which will allow 4G enabled cars to get new mapping instructions from the cloud as needed. This system and its associated GPS information is a key part of the On-Star 4G solution remaining integrted with the 911 response call system, database and command center. A major function is the automated detection and response notification to accidents. The timeliness of the notification is key to driver safety.


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