Self-driving vehicles

BMW LONDON 

Autonomous cars may be ready by end of decade: GM

General Motors believes self-driving vehicles could be ready by the end of the decade, and is already preparing for this by putting advanced driver assistance technologies in current production vehicles.

GM’s Vice President of Global Research and Development Alan Taub made the statements at the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress in Orlando, Florida on October 16th.

Taub actually said vehicles that partially drive themselves could be ready by the middle of this decade.

“The technologies we’re developing will provide an added convenience by partially or even completely taking over the driving duties,” Taub said. “The primary goal, though, is safety. Future generation safety systems will eliminate the crash altogether by interceding on behalf of drivers before they’re even aware of a hazardous situation.”

Besides systems used in current GM vehicles such as lane departure warnings and blind-zone alerts, future cars could be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, which could warn a car of possible hazards ahead such as stalled cars or sharp turns.

An EN-V concept vehicle on display at the ITS congress demonstrates some new technologies, such as pedestrian detection, collision avoidance, and automated parking and retrieval, where the vehicle drops off its driver, parks itself and then returns to pick up the driver via commands from a smartphone.

“In the coming years, we believe the industry will experience a dramatic leap in active safety systems, and, hopefully, a dramatic decline in injuries and fatalities on our roadways,” Taub said.

Source: Autonet