Originally Posted By: PandaBear
They will likely start as advanced cruise control that let you "tag" along the car in front of you, and use both wireless communication and sensors to detect any other cars or road condition around you. That way, you can outsource your driving to the 1st car in the chu chu train.
We're getting there. Adaptive cruise control uses this concept, where it seeks to establish and maintain a relative following distance from the vehicle ahead. My parents' 2014 MDX has this and it's interesting to see in the graphical display between the speedometer and tachometer when the outline of the car cartoon lights up (to let you know that it's "acquired" the vehicle in front of you). You can toy with it and slow down and change lanes and see when it's "lost" the vehicle ahead. It's got some rather intelligent programming where you can merge in behind a faster-moving car, with not nearly as much following distance as you've set in the system, but it won't slam on the brakes if it recognizes that the other car is moving much faster and it'll achieve that set distance in a short period of time.
It also has lane keep assist, which means that it'll actually STEER the car to maintain the lane. It has limits. (And the system is actually quite annoying, so it's usually turned off, but it demonstrates the concept.) You can drive completely hands-off. It'll steer you down the road maintaining the vehicle in the "center" of the lane within a tolerance. It allows the car to wander within the lane boundaries to the degree that you naturally would if you're piloting it yourself. And if your hands have been off the steering wheel for more than 5 or 8 seconds or something, it'll beep at you, alerting you to provide steering input. All that really requires is that you touch the wheel and then let go again. If you get too close to a lane marker (and force it over), or if you don't provide steering input when it asks you to, it'll give up and the system will disengage. I think there's a potential issue here: it doesn't give you a warning that it's actually disengaging. Even as attentive as I am, and certainly as attentive as I was while playing around with it, I sometimes didn't realize that it had given up on me until it started to wander too far to one side (and I then figured out that it wasn't doing anything).
Driverless cars are not something I look forward to. What we have now is fun to play with, but it's a novelty to me. Adaptive cruise seems to be nice, but I don't care for the adaptive steering at all. These two features are really only relevant on the interstate. We have a lot of "progress" to make, still, if we're going to go completely to droids in urban environments.
