Autonomous vehicles have the potential to be the new airbags or seat belts of our time, according to the head of one of Australia’s largest automotive parts manufacturers.
Bosch Australia CEO Gavin Smith was speaking at the 2015 Australian Road Safety Conference, held on the Gold Coast in October.
Smith says autonomous vehicles, or driverless cars, could be the single most important safety development for automobiles, making zero deaths on our roads a tangible reality.
“The root cause of more than 90% of crashes is human error,” Smith says.
“While I’m a strong supporter of the safe system approach to road safety, I do believe that the biggest bang for the buck come from the rapid development and accelerated adoption of driver assistance technologies.”
Smith says we are now seeing a “true race for an autonomous future”, with the technologies needed to make this future a reality already largely available and on the market.
“It was only a matter of time before big auto find a way to make this a commercial reality,” Smith says.
“Surprisingly, it was Google, not a major automobile or component company, that showed us this was possible. Applying radars, cameras, sonar sensors, GPS positioning and serious computing power, Google caught our imagination when they unveiled their autonomous cars in 2009.
“The underlying technology that will enable fully autonomous driving is already implemented in stand alone and combined functions, such as adaptive cruise control, drowsy driver detection, lane control support, traffic jam assistance, auto braking and auto parking, to name but a few.
“These functions are already mature and well-accepted. The technological leap is not in the underlying technology - it is integrating and combining these functions so that they work flawlessly and in all conditions. There is still quite some work to commercially deliver what we would consider full auto pilot, but we’re well on the way.”
Smith predicted a rapid development of autonomous technologies during the next decade.
“Automated parking will be available fairly soon,” Smith says.
“Remote parking - the ability to park your car from outside with your smartphone - will be available in the market from 2016. The autopilot and the driverless valet parking in car parks will follow before the decade ends. In the 2020s, vehicles with the highway pilot level of automation will allow the driver to cede full control of all safety critical functions, under certain conditions.
“Autonomous vehicles we believe will be another road safety bullet - maybe the most important one.”