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In the movies, James Bond drives an Aston Martin. In real life, the latest model — a sleek two-seater called the Vantage — is closer than ever to driving itself.
“We can actually pull a throttle away from the driver a little bit, back it off and increase the braking pressure to help rotate the car, to get you around that corner safely,” explained Terence Jenkins, an Aston Martin product specialist. “You, the driver, will never know this.”
The car — a $150,000 showpiece at the New England International Auto Show — is equipped with the same tiny sensors and cameras that will one day enable cars to fully drive themselves.
The technology comes standard, not just on fantasy cars, but family cars, too. Consider another model featured at the auto show: the Toyota Corolla with a base price of $19,000.
“There’s cameras inside the car that works with the lines of the road as you’re driving,” said John Stemberg, a Toyota product specialist. “If you veer out of your lane, you’ll hear a beep-beep, and then the car will make a one-time self-correction back to the center of its lane. It does this by itself.”
If you veer out of your lane, you'll hear a beep-beep and then the car will make a one-time self-correction back to the center of its lane. It does this by itself.
No Driver Needed
To find a car that needs no driver, step just outside the auto show into Boston’s Seaport neighborhood, where an MIT spin-off company called nuTonomy is testing its car. It sports a company logo and an oversized roof antenna, but otherwise, the white Renault looks like a typical economy car. There’s even a driver behind the wheel.
“In reality,” said Karl Iagnemma, president of nuTonomy, “the car is driving itself.”
The driver is there in case something goes wrong. After a year of testing within the confines of the Raymond Flynn Marine Industrial Park, the company’s safety record convinced the city to green light limited passenger service. A select group of people use the Lyft app to summon the car for short rides in the Seaport.
“What we find is, after people have been in the car for a few minutes, once they become convinced the car is safe, they very quickly start doing other things – looking at their phone, looking out the window,” said Iagnemma.
In reality, the car is driving itself
nuTonomy is not allowing the public — or journalists — to ride in the self-driving car. Iagnemma says that will eventually happen, but first he wants to further test the technology. Boston is the company’s second testing ground and more challenging than the first, which was the city-state of Singapore.
“Singapore drivers, I would say, obey the rules of the road a little more closely than the people of Boston,” said Iagnemma.
Translation: Boston drivers live up to their aggressive reputation. There’s also inclement weather, construction and jay-walkers. Add it up, and Boston creates an excellent environment for refining self-driving technology.
Betting Big On Self-Driving Technology
There’s big money riding on the car's success.
The auto parts giant Delphi bought nuTonomy for $450 million last year and then created a new company called Aptiv . It’s now opening a robotics center in the Seaport dedicated to self-driving technology.
Aptiv predicts limited self-driving service — most likely in a multi-passenger vehicle — will be available within the next couple of years.
“For the cars that you and I drive, that’s a bit of a longer time frame. We look at that’s being more 2025,” said Glen De Vos, Aptiv’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, “but the process starts here fairly quickly.”
Not So Fast
Not everyone shares that optimistic timetable.
“Conceptually, we have made incredible strides in sensing, mapping, path planning, the fundamental core of technologies here,” said Bryan Reimer, associate director at The New England University Transportation Center at MIT . “But the last five percent is still to come. These are difficult engineering problems that will take time to get right.”
These are difficult engineering problems that will take time to get right
Get it wrong, he said, and car companies — in an industry-wide race to develop self-driving cars — risk alienating consumers. People admiring the latest models at the car show may be okay with technology that keeps them from driving off the road, but Reimer’s research shows a trend toward increased skepticism about self-driving cars.
“As we get closer to an automated future, consumer interest in that, between 2016 and 2017, was definitely stepping backwards,” said Reimer.
Despite this reality: human error is to blame for 90 percent of car crashes . The odds of crashing in an autonomous vehicle are far lower — only 10 percent. But Reimer said statistics aren’t enough to overcome an innate bias to accept human, but not machine error .
“Will that change?” asked Reimer. “Absolutely.”
He said self-driving technology is the future and, when it does fully arrive, it will be transformative.
“Eventually, it will change everything about how we live and move,” he said.
