The car industry has hugely underestimated the problems of developing autonomous cars and driverless highway systems are still years away, the new head of Mercedes R&D has admitted.
Replicating drivers using artificial intelligence remained “a huge undertaking” while the sensors needed to “see” were costly and not up to the task.
“The challenges are way bigger than anybody thought,” Markus Schaefer told The Australian at the Frankfurt Motor Show, which opened late Tuesday, Australian time. “We underestimated, absolutely.”
Governments and research bodies in Australia have committed millions of dollars to driverless systems, with NSW recently announcing it would set up a centre of excellence to help commercialise the technology, while Victoria is spending $2.3m on trials with Bosch as part of a $9m program.
Perth already has driverless buses running along a prescribed route and, using French-made “Intellicar” vehicles, was due to begin testing an autonomous ride-hailing system this year.
Mercedes is also working with Bosch and they will soon begin pilot tests of a fully automated ride-hailing service in San Jose, California.
But the cars will retain safety drivers and Mr Schaefer said fully autonomous systems that could handle urban roads were a distant prospect. “Free-floating routes in all kinds of areas in a city — that’s not very near in the future,” he said.
The eventual cost of such systems would rule them out for private cars because both the car and technology industries had “completely underestimated” how hard it would be to replicate human drivers in cities.
“Now we understand what a human being is capable of doing — it’s a huge undertaking.”
Full autonomy in a Mercedes would be limited to highway driving, he said, with a goal of offering a system by 2024. Mercedes will reveal a new S-Class limousine next year, extending its highway system, which allows hands-free operation for a minute or so before prompting the driver to resume control.
Its Frankfurt show centrepiece, a study for a future electric limousine called EQS, features “highly automated driving at level 3” for long motorway journeys. Level 3 requires a driver to constantly monitor the situation.
But even with 18,000 engineers, going to the next stage was too big a task for Mercedes alone and it will co-operate with rival BMW on the project.
Mr Schaefer said autonomous systems had to prove they were better than humans but achieving 100 per cent safety meant allowing for the unpredictable behaviour of others.
“To what degree do you consider misuse of another participant in traffic and what certainty do you want to assume in your system that you’re dealing in the proper manner with the situation?’’ he said.
“Is 99 per cent enough? Or do you want 99.9999? It makes a huge difference — a factor of thousands.”
A few years ago, carmakers queued up to claim they would have self-driving cars by 2021 and Mercedes said it was in front. “Despite having thousands of people, spending billions, having better sensor equipment … despite the latest developments, I don’t know of any autonomous car that can drive on the road,” Mr Schaefer said. “None.”
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