Autonomous vehicles - an automotive trend or a challenge?

Written by Daniel Andzhurov - June 2, 2020

Photo credits: THE CONVERSATION

Driverless cars are not a 2020 trend in the automotive industry as research and development have been going on for a while. In the last eight to ten years companies have been making attempts to meet the claims of having 10 million autonomous vehicles on the roads by 2020.

Unfortunately, that did not happen because a driverless car is as much of a trend as it is a challenge to be designed and produced.

Generally speaking, there are five main types of challenges that have to be overcome by the vehicle’s designers and engineers.

First of all and most important is the accident liability of the driverless car. Safety is always first as, on the road, people’s lives are pledged. Evidence of failure to achieve the required level of safety is an accident that happened in 2018. An Uber driverless car ran down a pedestrian due to some software imperfections.

Road and Weather conditions also make the job of engineers more difficult. They can be very unpredictable and they different from one place to another. The same goes for the Traffic conditions as well.

Last but not the least, there is the radar interference. There is yet to be developed a sure technology which will not allow one vehicle to take information from another. For instance, if a car notices an object and transmits this information by accident to another car, the latter may try to avoid the object and eventually hit another one.

Auto Trendy’s take:

Automotive engineering has always been having plenty of challenges and they usually go hand by hand with the trends. Today, we live in a very sophisticated time technology and trend wise. Thus, we are facing difficult tasks which are about to take us to new destinations and new developments such as artificial intelligence. We are excited and we are keeping our eyes on the outcomes of all of this.