Autonomous driving is gospel at CES
LAS VEGAS EXTRAVAGANZA: Automakers and tech companies develop their vision of the self-driving future
Tegra chips. Graphics processing units and 256-core GPUs. Even something incongruously called teraflops.
Now I know what it feels like when I geek-out with casually dropped particulars like brake specific fuel consumption and the infinitely variable gear ratios available from a continuously variable transmission.
I’ll save you the trouble of summoning Google and tell you that a teraflop is a direct measure of a computer’s speed, one teraflop representing a trillion floating point operations per second.
Now, go ahead and ask me what a floating point operation is. I don’t have a freakin’ clue; all that I know, having now fully geeked out at the Consumer Electronics Show’s press day, is that teraflops are to ECUs what horsepower is to internal combustion engines; bigger numbers are better and more, geeks and gearheads at least agreeing on this, is never quite enough.
Geek-speak or no, though, these bits, bytes and flops are terms we gearheads will need to add to our lexicon because, in the future, they will be as important to automotive technology as torque splits and gear ratios. At least that’s the gospel being preached at the Las Vegas Convention Centre where something that began as a fair about TVs and bouncing little gummy bears flailing about to the beat of wi-fi’ed music (don’t ask!) has morphed into a car show with widgets.
Automakers have flocked to Vegas this year to show off their wares, some autonomous driving (Mercedes-Benz and Audi), some of their nifty little self-parking apps (BMW) and others just novelty items (Hyundai’s Genesis can now be unlocked via a smartwatch, the implication, of course, that pushing a button on a remote key fob is now simply too much of a travail).
The battle cry of this year’s show, at least the automotive part of it, is autonomous driving, attendees who couldn’t differentiate a Ferrari from a Fiesta suddenly paying attention to automakers’ displays. Nonetheless, there seems a widening disconnect between what traditional automakers think will appeal to us gearheads and what the new digital interlopers are promising to the gadget conscious.
While watching the press conferences — Mercedes-Benz unveiled a concept car so autonomous that all four seats in the cabin faced inward, like around the kitchen table — would have one believe that drivers are a thing of the past, in reality all the traditional automakers are still requiring someone behind the wheel (an Audi A7 may have selfdriven itself here from Silicon Valley, but there was always someone behind the wheel and the computer turned over control of the car to the driver once it reached the mean streets of Vegas).
Google, on the other hand, can’t wait to get the steering wheel out of the car, its vision — which it says it may soon implement in its California home base of Mountain View — being a vast fleet of driverless taxi cabs that fit into the new “on demand” model of personal transportation.
This is a fundamental split in the automotive business model: automakers still looking to sell cars, albeit ones that can mostly drive themselves, while Google wants to completely revolutionize mobility. Its vision of transportation’s future rests on the premise that the millennials of the future don’t want to ever own a car, the solution being Google’s driverless taxis or driverless Car(s)2Go that are delivered right to your door. Never in its 125-year history has the automotive industry been in such need of clear, unambiguous rules and guidelines, such is the disparity in vision and implementation of digitized automobiles.
One company seemingly ideally positioned to bridge this gap between digital and automotive worlds is Bosch, worldwide purveyors of everything from tiny little sensors (50 per cent of all smartphones, says the company, utilize some form of Bosch hardware) to complete hardware/software solution for the automotive industry.
Its Traffic Jam Assist system — with its ability to assume total control of the car’s braking, acceleration and even steering up to 60 kilometres an hour in a traffic jam — would seem the ideal bridge between the phantasmagorical automated driving of tomorrow and the real-world driving problems of today. A plan for seats to automatically move in an optimal position for crash safety whenever an airbag is deployed would seem another practical solution to an everyday problem. Devices that turn the entire windshield into an augmented reality navigational display may seem a little more futuristic but would be no less useful.
The German giant even has solutions to what is quickly becoming the No. 1 concern in connecting automobiles to the Internet of things; security. According to Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch USA, the company’s on board electronics will have a hardware divide between its infotainment systems (not crucial if hacked) and anything with control over engine/braking subsystems. Obviously, security protocols around anything controlling acceleration and braking would be far more stringent than an app playing the Chill channel.
Expect to hear more about this in the future as wags around CES decried automotive electronics software as incredibly porous with up to 10 to 20 times the number of errors per thousands lines of codes compared with computational devices. That becomes even scarier when you consider that luxury cars can have as many as 100 on board electronic ECUs and that companies are rushing to offer on board connectivity (in 2015, every Chevrolet sold in Canada, save the Traverse and Camaro, will come standard with a 4G LTE Wi-Fi hot spot).
Considering the disasters this past year in Internet security — the Sony/ The Interview hack is just the tip of the iceberg — on board software security may become the driving safety issue of the future. One more reason why we gearheads might want to learn what a floating point operation is.