Autonomous Driving: Still Not Ready For Prime Time
Autonomous driving technology is currently all the rage in the automotive industry, but it's important to understand that, like hydrogen fuel, we're currently years away from its widespread implementation - and will likely remain years away for decades. There are so many factors working against self-driving cars that they seem likely to exist solely as touchpoints for high-tech fetishists for the foreseeable future.
A recent visit to Kia's research and development center in Namyang, Korea, illustrated this point. I was given the opportunity to be a passenger in a prototype version of the Kia Soul EV, an electric vehicle that had been upgraded with a suite of experimental autonomous technologies. I want to note that this car was not capable of fully autonomous driving - it was instead outfitted with several different features that offered autonomous capability under human supervision. Even still, I was not permitted to sit in the driver's seat, as a Kia engineer chaperoned throughout the drive.
The demonstration involved several different autonomous systems, including an impressive cruise control feature that not only braked the Soul EV automatically when it came up upon a slower moving car, but also checked the lane to the left for traffic, activated the turn signal, then steered the crossover to pass the poky driver in front before returning to its original lane. However, of the various systems we were shown, one of them - the ability to follow the vehicle driving ahead of the Soul EV, even as it executed a sharp, low-speed turn - simply didn't work no matter what the engineer tried to do make it engage.
Herein lies the issue. Roughly 75 percent of the autonomous technologies that had been specifically prepared for this closed course demonstration worked. That might be a passing grade in college, but in the real world, true autonomous driving has to be 110 percent effective or it's not going to cut it. Your brakes don't work only 75 percent of the time. Neither do your seatbelts. Until the tech has advanced to the point where snow, salt, ice, dirt, grime, darkness, or a butterfly flapping its wings in Seoul have no effect on its reliability, we're always going to be a few years away from fully autonomous cars.