Self-driving cars
An autonomous car wins a race against the same model with a driver.
Who will win? An international contest has arisen between the automotive and IT industries for the future of the car. Its key area is piloted driving. IT giant Google is building a fleet of 150 self-driving cars for tests. German premium car manufacturers Mercedes, Audi and BMW are responding with futuristic and fast prototypes. Positioned in-between are the German automotive suppliers Continental, Bosch and ZF that own a large part of the know-how for driving assistance systems. In fact, this is a multibillion euro market of the future. Roland Berger Strategy Consultants anticipates that the market for assistance systems alone will more than treble by 2020.
What is the current state of development? While Google’s small round two-seaters are more reminiscent of toy cars and the Mercedes F 015 Luxury in Motion research vehicle has so far only inspired the consumer electronics fans at the CES fair in Las Vegas, Audi has succeeded in presenting a very impressive prototype. The Audi RS 7 Piloted Driving Concept has eight cylinders, 560 hp and Quattro drive and achieves a top speed of 306 km/h. Its decisive feature, however, is described by the acronym “zFAS”. The “zentrale Fahrassistenzsteuersystem” – or central driver assistance control system – processes GPS data, images from ultrafast 3-D cameras and other information with centimetre accuracy in real time. During tests it achieved speeds of up to 240 km/h in Hockenheim and 205 km/h on the demanding Ascari track in Spain. A journalist from Die Zeit, the major German weekly, undertook an interesting experiment and raced against a self-driving RS 7 as the driver of the same model. Who won? The journalist completed the course 20 seconds slower.
First systems in production vehicles
Despite the advanced state of development, the experts estimate that fully autonomous driving will take another twenty or thirty years. Before the end of the decade, however, individual systems will be deployed in production vehicles – for example, Audi’s traffic jam assist system, which takes control of the steering wheel in slowly moving traffic between 0 and 60 km/h and automatically accelerates and brakes the car.
