Autonomous cars

on a road near you soon...

The March of Time...and the driverless car moves ever onwards. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona recently, the head of the Renault-Nissan alliance Carlos Ghosn said that he is planning the development of an autonomous connected car. It should be on the market as early as 2016.

Renault-Nissan is currently the fourth biggest car maker in the world and one of the largest manufacturers of electric vehicles and clearly sees autonomous technology as the inevitable way forward for driving. Autonomous vehicles are moving forward apace to become the next technological in-betweener in the motoring world. The autonomous vehicle is not a totally driverless vehicle like those being developed by Google, but rather a hybrid with a retained element of human control.

The car will have connected features which means that it will, for example, be capable of driving autonomously in traffic jams with the driver able to take their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road while the car moves forward itself. Using M2M connectivity, autonomous cars will be able to sync with red lights and other traffic on the road. Renault-Nissan claims that the automatic features of the car make it far less likely to have accidents and make driving a nicer and more relaxing experience. And apparently the technology for this is already there, as Carlos Ghosn says: “That’s ready today, we just need the regulators to accept it,”
Carlos Ghosn's thinking is that currently true driverless driving will not be able to go mainstream for a while – maybe a decade - as the technology to enable the vehicles to make rational decisions in an emergency is not yet developed enough. Motorway and out of town driving however will go forward with a second wave of innovation likely in 2018.
Many manufacturers are interested in the production of autonomous vehicles and this is generally welcomed by Ghosn as he believes that collaboration is the key to further innovation.  He is currently collaborating with NASA to share ideas on robotics and remote control which could make the crossover to terrestrial vehicles.
“We are working with a lot of startups. We are in Silicon Valley to be sure we know what startups are working on and associate ourselves with the people developing technology that’s important to us,” said Ghosn.
“There are so many unknowns and we cannot solve all the problems ourselves, so there are a lot of opportunities for startups and competitors that invest and develop new technology.”
As always with new technologies we wonder how this will affect motorcycles in the future. Will the technology be good enough to keep motorcyclists safe and have they been fully factored in?  Time will tell, but one thing's for sure it's all coming to a road near you soon!