AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES: ARE WE THERE YET?

Sit back, relax and let the car do all the driving – sounds like the perfect antidote to a stressful day at work.

But new research finds people aware of the coming autonomous vehicle trend actually aren’t as enthusiastic as previously thought, according to the 2018 Deloitte Global Automotive Consumer Study.

Half the respondents in the US study said they did not believe autonomous vehicles (AVS) would be safe, an improvement on a survey two years before that said 74% were concerned about safety.

But carmakers and systems manufacturers are unrepentant. They say AVS are coming and probably sooner rather than later. Bosch Australian engineers will be sitting in a car for the next three years driving through Victorian country roads with barely any steering or braking input.

If you own a new car, you are probably already part of the process. Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) has cameras and sensors atop the windscreen or in the grille to “watch” the car ahead and control your speed – a technology known as “adaptive cruise” – and automatically brake when they do.

It is also watching the white lines on the road, able to provide lane departure warnings, and is ready to nudge the steering wheel if you try to cross the lines (a trick known as lane-keep assist) while checking cars on each side using blind-spot monitoring.

Park against a wall and you can’t accidentally hit the accelerator because of “acceleration mitigation”, nor reverse into a passing pedestrian or car because of “rear cross-traffic alert”. And if you’re dozing at the traffic lights and the guy ahead pulls away, there’s a warning buzzer (a “lead vehicle start alert”). Many new cars will allow you to follow the vehicle ahead in slow traffic, braking and accelerating and steering without driver input for up to 30 seconds.

So you’re already there. But things will only get easier, if maybe a little weird in the future.