The Ultimate Backseat Driver

The arrival of the driverless car is something we’ve all been anticipating for a long time. Every year we seem to roll a little bit closer to the day we can simply tell our cars where to take us, then sit back and enjoy the ride.

While IHS predicts that 9 per cent of the automotive market will be driverless cars by 2035, the first driverless cars will be making it to the consumer market far sooner than that. Last year, US state Nevada became the first place in the world where driverless cars could operate legally on public roads.

Consumer cars with Intelligent Parking Assist systems such as the Ford Focus and some of the Mercedes range have been available on the Australian market for a couple of years now, easing drivers into the idea of completely hands-free driving.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show saw some new self-driving innovations that will begin to appear on the market over the next few years – such as an Audi that uses cameras, ultrasonic sensors and a built-in navigation system to enable cars to drive themselves along specially marked European highways. The Audi also slows downs, stops and calls emergency services if it detects an unresponsive driver.

“We are not reinventing the car, we are redefining mobility,” said the Audi’s chairman Rupert Stadler.

BMW also showed off its new X4 at the show. The X4 boasts a Proactive Driving Assistant, which

Google has reported that its fleet of computer-controlled Lexuses and Priuses, used for collecting data for Google Maps, have logged over 500,000km of self-driving without accident.manages gear selection and alerts drivers to tight corners and lowered speed limits ahead. At last year’s show, Volvo presented technology that allows a vehicle to park itself using a mobile phone app.

While there are still a lot of issues to overcome – such as the administering of licenses for ‘drivers’ of automated cars, privacy concerns and even cyber security – driverless cars are not too far over the horizon for the Australian market.

The race to refine the technology is well and truly underway and you will see a lot of exciting developments in this space over the next couple of years – so sit back and enjoy the ride!