Revolutionary road: Germany takes first step
TECHNOLOGY/ New legislation has taken the nation closer to the reality of autonomous cars, writes Michael Taylor
German carmakers finally have a framework to develop and produce self-driving cars after the country’s parliament approved autonomous driving laws last week.
After years of pleading from vehicle manufacturers, which insisted their self-driving technology far outstripped German law, the country’s upper house of parliament finally defined how autonomous cars could use German roads.
But the rules won’t please everyone because they effectively place all responsibility for autonomous car crashes on the manufacturer.
The law, which was pushed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, insists a driver must not only be at the wheel of a car running in autonomous mode but they also need to be prepared to take back control of the car if necessary.
INVESTMENT
All of Germany’s peak premium carmakers, such as BMW, Audi, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz’s parent company Daimler, have invested heavily in autonomous technologies, which they have mainly tested in Nevada or California in the US, specific pieces of approved autobahns in Germany or at their own private test centres.
Volkswagen is also a leading player in the development of autonomous cars, while Ford and Opel lag behind.
The law effectively circumvents the EU’s Vienna Conventions and takes autonomous cars up to Level 3 in the five-step classification for autonomous driving. With Level 3 loosely defined as “hands off” to watch movies, use phones or read books but prepared to take over in a hurry, at least two German cars will push the limits of the new law in 2017. The all-new Audi A8 and the Mercedes-Benz S-Class facelift, due in 2017, will deliver the technology required for Level 3 autonomy, although Mercedes had planned to use a time limit for hands-off driving.
The next step would be Level 4 (or “mind off”) driving, which lets the driver decide to completely relinquish control, then Level 5, with no human intervention necessary at all.
The German government concluded that autonomous driving was, as Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said, “the greatest mobility revolution since the invention of the car”.
The law also demands that companies fit cars with black boxes to record when the driver was in control and when the car was in control, ostensibly to allow the government to apportion blame in crashes and traffic offences.
While the driver will be responsible for crashes, the manufacturer will be responsible for any self-driving crashes where the system has failed or its programmers had overlooked something serious, such as when Tesla’s system couldn’t see a turning truck in Florida in May 2016 and 40-year-old Joshua Brown was killed.
While the law has not clarified the government’s position on data protection or collection, this will be readdressed in two years’ time.
As reported last week, South Korea is also supporting the self-driving technology of its own carmakers by developing K-City, a 360,000m² test centre.
Conceived to pull Kia, Hyundai and Genesis towards the forefront of autonomous vehicle development, K-City is an 11-billion won (about R130bn) project from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, even though the country’s vehicle manufacturers have been allowed to test autonomous cars on South Korean roads since November 2016.
While BMW, Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen test at a variety of their own circuits as well as in California and Nevada, Daimler has taken testing even further, developing its own private test centre. develop digitally, verify on the test track, and then test in the real world when the vehicle is nearly ready.
But the core of it isn’t as complex as the technical mountain autonomous engineers have to climb. It’s old-school concrete and tar.
“For autonomous driving we have a huge concrete place that’s more important. It’s not a track, but 200m by 300m, with lanes to accelerate you into a free concrete space.”
If that seems a world away from perceptions of the mega hi-tech needed for the production of autonomous and electric cars, there’s a reason. The core of it is not the technology of the site. It’s the flexibility to replicate problems found virtually and in the real world.
MANOEUVRES
“We need that [the concrete space] to do all kinds of manoeuvres. We don’t need that many miles of road for it.
“Rather, certain scenarios, like vehicles merging or cutting into lanes, automated driving targets and being able to do it over and over again.
“It’s more flexible if there is a thin metal plate on wheels [as the hazard vehicle[ that’s radiocontrolled and with a Styrofoam body on top of it.
“We can change the bodies [on top of the plates] to be people or cars or trucks or vans or bikes. We can change the speed or angles or directions.
“If we want a car to test with 0.6 seconds in front, then this target vehicle can do that over and over again very reliably,” says Von Hugo.
Autonomous driving will need a lot of simulations and far more validation than any form of personal mobility.
“There is a lot of simulation needed for autonomous driving. We don’t want to drive every manoeuvre, but we want to improve our algorithms so we don’t need to.
“Once we have driven a manoeuvre multiple times we simulate it again and again and then improve the algorithm to run it back through the same data. Maybe it’s a tenth of a second closer or a km/h faster, but based on the same data.
“We always want to cover more simulations. It can be just software in the loop, but sometimes we want to see how the hardware changes affect it, so we put that in the loop as well.
“With the virtual phase, it’s not just about the technology and no malfunctions but the people and how they do things and react,” Von Hugo says.
DAIMLER HAS TAKEN TESTING EVEN FURTHER, DEVELOPING ITS OWN PRIVATE TEST CENTRE