Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Where there’s a wheel…
Autonomous drive swings by Cape Town on a world tour
The autonomous car comes to Cape Town
What’s so hard about this autonomous drive thing? We’re on the homebound leg from Cape Point, riding shotgun with the team from MercedesBenz Intelligent World Drive, and the car is humming along, adapting speed and steering, the driver making course corrections as needed. This, my friends, is the future. And it’s already here. On the computer display, objects came spooling into view as the radar and cameras resolve blips into trees. Pillars, indicating armco. Bushes. Grass. Pedestrians. “Tortoise!” A jolting G-force pulls me left as the man in the driver’s seat yanks the wheel hard right in response to the yell from the back seat. Even as our bodies jerk leftwards, he yanks the wheel back into the straightahead position. Then, left. We’re bobbing around like crash test dummies, but we’re back on the correct side of the road and cruising ahead. In our wake: a bemused but live tortoise.
Now, unless you’re another tortoise, a tortoise isn’t the most difficult thing on Earth to avoid. But that’s only if you see it. Which our car clearly didn’t.
Or, actually it did. We discovered this later, over lunch. The car – or rather its radar eye – saw a blip, a bump moving at... well, at tortoise speed... across the road from the left verge. Sorry, not an object of interest, but logged just the same.
It’s all in a day’s work for the MercedesBenz Intelligent World Drive team. On the fourth leg of their mini world tour to show off and test their idea of the self-driving car, they travelled to Cape Town in December. Different countries, different conditions. Different driving styles.
Like they’re on a country road, looking at a 22- wheeler heading towards them. Then the slab of truck becomes two slabs of truck, side by side, filling up the entire roadway, as an initially hidden second truck overtakes and barrels head-on towards them. Autonomous cars drive by the rules, which dictate that they stay in their lane, between the lines. This is not a good thing with a horse and trailer bearing down on you. Time to do what the locals do: break the rules, edge into the yellow lane and give the trucker the evil eye as you pass.
The thing to bear in mind is that the base system available on these cars has sufficient ability to do pretty decent semiautonomous driving. In stop-go traffic or on long stretches of freeway, you could go hands-free and feet-free apart from those nagging reminders to apply steering wheel pressure. You solve that by lightly holding the wheel.
In the test car, the steering reminder is disabled. And the GPS data are integrated with the system so that it can, in a way, see around corners, know that you’re at an intersection and your intended route. Though not whether the lights are red or green.
Here’s a thing you can try. Check your mirrors and blind spots, flick the indicator stalk and change lanes when it’s safe. Congratulations: you just did what our car can do.
The thing is, cars don’t just suddenly sprout autonomous powers, which at this point are largely human powers. Their sensors may have laser vision, but that doesn’t mean they understand what they are looking at (a tortoise, for instance). For that, they need humans. We may not be able to see stuff, but we can analyse and predict and when something does come into view we usually know what to make of it. Though perhaps not those zigzag lines at the top of Ou Kaapse Weg.
“This is puzzling us. Can you explain?” asks Jochen from driver’s seat. Although he’s not actually doing the driving: the car is, for the moment. But he has his hands on the wheel. He is specially certified for this job. Besides being a mechanical engineer, he has to be licensed to pilot – that sounds more apt – the autonomous testbed that is this S- Class.
I give it my best shot. “It’s an alert. You usually see it as a white zig-zag line approaching pedestrian crossings. Here at the top of the climb, it’s a yellow line, so I guess that means no stopping.”
He nods, only half convinced.
In the test car, the steering reminder is disabled. And the GPS data are integrated with the system so that it can, in a way, see around corners.
Fortunately, before long we see another zig-zag line, this time white. It’s on the approach to… a pedestrian crossing. Bingo. Then we see another. Okay, he’s convinced. He double-punches a button on the steering wheel and the system logs a data point, ensuring that about half a minute either side of the point is captured in data, video and audio (he mutters into a nearby microphone). The car itself is set up with 360-degree vision on the outside, including stereo (hence 3D) forward-facing units and an interior camera to be sure nothing gets missed.
But there are things we humans simply can’t explain to an autonomous car, or even to a curious German engineer who speaks excellent English. You know what I’m talking about. Yes, it’s that central barrier, the one with double solid lines encasing a broken line. Eventually, I give up trying to explain why three lines is better than two, or for that matter one.
Speaking of lines: other countries don’t do red lines. Here in South Africa, we do. Red on black is more or less light black against dark black when you’re a car that sees in black and white. There are times the car can be blinded, too: when the lines fade, when there’s insufficient contrast with the road surface. Human eyes are better that way. But human eyes have other failings. Those visual warnings that pop up on the car’s instrument display? Red is a great warning colour, unless you’re, yes, colour blind. So colour- coding may not be the greatest solution.
The car can do other clever things besides brake, accelerate and steer. Its lights are quite smart. We watch a video showing how, ahead of the car, objects at the side of the road are spotted. Among those objects, pedestrians are identified. The smart LED lights spotlight the pedestrians, flickering on them to alert the driver. Clever.
Oh, that lane change manoeuvre that saved the tortoise? Pretty smart action for a human, but did you know that the Mercedes-benz has that action built into its autonomous drive program?
To see it in action, though, you need a pedestrian. The car will evade the roadside person, all by itself. Not tortoises, though. Well, not yet, anyway.