The possibility of self-driving vehicles landing on our roads looks quite bright in the near future. And the reason for this optimism is the active involvement and interest of major car manufacturing and technology companies of the world. Some of the world's biggest companies are in race for either manufacturing or testing self-driving automobiles on roads, to achieve market leadership in this area. Prominent among them being Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Volvo, Google, Apple, Volkswagen and Uber. The DRIVEN group consortium of British technological companies is pioneering research in self-driving or autonomous cars.
General Motors plans to develop autonomous controls in the Bolt and Super Cruise in the Cadillac CT6. Volvo also plans to launch self-driving vehicles to customers by 2021. Honda plans to release fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 and by 2021 BMW expects to release its fully self-driving car iNEXT.
Tesla, a US based company, is emerging as a world leader in self-driving car manufacturing. The company claims that all its vehicles have necessary hardware needed for full self-driving capability. It claims to have an advanced sensor coverage that includes eight surround camera's and twelve ultrasonic sensors, which provide the vehicle 360 degrees of visibility around the car up to 250 meters of range and detection of both hard and soft objects.
The US, UK, and Germany are leading the way in autonomous cars. Currently, driverless car testing is taking place in small urban areas of UK, USA, Japan and Germany. The trails are examining the effectiveness of connecting cars to each other, traffic lights and other things around on roads as well as to advanced information systems such as emergency vehicles warnings.
In the UK, the country's largest autonomous car trials have been taking place on public roads since 2017 under which companies like jaguar Land Rover, Ford and the Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) are sharing their findings. Such trials are aimed at testing autonomous vehicle technology, using specially adapted, and GPS connected vehicles that have a capability of self-driving.
Similarly, Google's Waymo started testing trials on public roads in 2017 in USA. China too has recently allowed road tests of such autonomous vehicles, with Beijing becoming the first city to allow companies to try out the technology on its streets. Recently the US House of Representatives unanimously passed an autonomous vehicles bill titled, 'Self Drive Act 2017' signaling broad support for this emerging technology. Similarly, other European countries such as Germany, the UK, etc. have passed legislation to govern self-driving cars.
Developing countries such as China and India are yet to catch up with the developed nations in self-driving technology, although some initiatives have already been started for developing this technology. In India, researchers and engineers working at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Kharagpur, Kanpur and Bombay are working on 'autonomous vehicle solutions'. In addition, a few Indian car manufacturing companies like Tata Motors and Tech Mahindra have announced their plans to develop self-driving cars for Indian roads. But there is a lot that still needs to be done. In India, before the government takes any decision on allowing self-driving cars on the roads, there is perhaps a need to enable the public road networks for self-driving cars the relevant infrastructure needs to be developed across the country. Manufacturers also need to ensure that self-driving cars adopt energy-efficient technologies, e-mobility options, and affordable pricing in order to provide a seamless experience for the commuters.
For the moment, let's wait and watch as the driverless car scenario unfolds in the coming years.
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