Let’s go for a test drive in Mobileye’s self-driving car
JERUSALEM: Ziv Aviram has one of his tech guys bring the test car around to the parking lot. The co-founder of Mobileye tells me he’s going to drive around Jerusalem without touching the steering wheel. “Hop in,” the CEO says. The test car bristles with eight cameras. The interior contains laptops with blinking screens. The tech guy jumps into the back seat and begins to do things. You hear typing.
Mobileye is a global player, building Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for two dozen international car manufacturers.
These are the sensor packages that auto-brake for imminent collisions, warn drivers about lane drift and reduce speed when approaching slow-moving vehicles. Calamity- avoidance stuff.
“Buckle up,” Aviram instructs. “We go for a ride.”
This street-ready prototype is good for “proof of concept” testing, meaning it is not fully self- driving yet. When the true autonomous vehicles go on sale, Aviram promises, you won’t see any cameras, maybe just lenses. The processors, satellite receivers, mapping, laser radar, sonar will all be shrunk. The tech guy in the back seat will disappear.
Later, they will get rid of the steering wheel, too.
I want to trust Aviram. But this is Israel, a place where people boast about how badly they drive. Many Israelis already drive without their hands on the wheel, because they are drinking coffee or having a smoke while talking on a cellphone.
Aviram hand-steers Mobileye’s white sedan out of the lot into traffic. He waits until he has merged onto a decent three-lane highway before he lets go of the wheel.
“You’re driving now in the future,” he says.
Mobileye is partnering with BMW, Intel and Delphi to make this happen sooner than you might think.
I notice that Aviram, while in spiel mode, is not really paying total attention to the road ahead, or to the beater passenger van filled with yeshiva kids shouldering into our lane from the right, without signalling, or to the gravel truck up ahead, belching smoke, crawling in the passing lane on the left.
“You’re in the time machine,” he purrs.
We’re in heavy Jerusalem traffic, I think.
“You have the opportunity to glimpse how our lives will look in a few years.”
I’m glimpsing the van muscling into our space.
Then Aviram has to subtly adjust the wheel – for the van.
This is not a gotcha moment. This is beta-testing. If the technologists in San Jose, Yokohama and Munich are right, it will soon give way to the biggest advance in automotive technology since the Ford Model T rolled off assembly lines around a century ago. In the 2020s, they say, autonomous cars will be the wheeled version of the smartphone.
“In two decades, it will be illegal to drive in developed countries,” Aviram predicts.
He understands that this concept takes a few minutes to sink in.
“The wave is too big to stop,” he says. — Washington Post