Technology is only half the battle in developing autonomous cars

I’m never particularly comfortable in the back seat of a car unless it happens to be one of those enormous limousines, and in this case it’s worse than ever. In fact, the experience is precisely the opposite to what you’d usually associate with Lexus, the luxury division of Toyota Motor Corp, which has for almost 30 years been producing luxury cars that offer value for money and bomb-proof reliability. 

No, in this case I’m squeezed in between an engineer and a translator in order to provide layers of understanding – of what is being said and what the hell is going on. Behind me, where the parcel shelf ought to be, various fans are pumping out heat and white noise as they keep unseen computers in the boot cool. There is a driver, too, but his job is not to drive. I’m in Tokyo and something extraordinary is about to happen. I’m about to be driven across town by an autonomous car – a modified hybrid version of the Lexus GS.

That’s to say, the car will do the driving on a public road on an ordinary Wednesday morning in Japan. This, indeed, should be interesting. Of course, autonomous cars aren’t entirely new; Google has had a fleet of modified Priuses driving around California for a couple of years now. We know, also, that varying levels of automotive autonomy have been manifesting themselves in production vehicles for 10 years now, with technology such as automatic braking, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring and lane monitoring all slowly filtering their way down from Mercedes S-Class to humdrum family run-abouts. 

The technology to deliver true autonomy, however, is a whole different ball game, writing software that can deal with the fast-moving and utterly unpredictable world that is a busy street, without the input of a human being.
The fact is that everybody is at it, and autonomous drive will be part of an automotive landscape that will change almost beyond belief in the next five to 10 years.

Lexus is quick to point out that this is far from a finished product, calling these self-driving Lexuses the Lexus Mobility Teammate Concept, a rather wordy way of saying that these cars require input from a driver, and that they are very much in concept shape at present. It is perhaps the sheer amount of noise coming from competitor manufacturers around autonomous technology that pushed Toyota to act against its notoriously conservative instincts and expose journalists to what is very much a work in progress.

And kudos to them, in fact, because despite the very apparent anxiety among Toyota staff on the day, everything worked. Under the control of the driver we eased out of the building near the Tokyo Big Sight, home to the biennial Tokyo Motor Show, and joined one of the vast city’s elevated freeways. It is with some disappointment that I have to report there was no grand announcement, no computerised voice saying “autonomous drive engaged”.

The driver simply pressed a button on the steering wheel, and then let go altogether. What followed was remarkable. The hybrid Lexus attained the speed limit and remained in its lane. A slower truck impeded our progress, so the car checked its surrounds, indicated appropriately and overtook the truck, retaking its place in the left-hand lane (the Japanese drive on the left). It braked and accelerated as the traffic dictated and then, for our Toyota hosts at least,
there was high drama: a man in a van realised he was about to miss an off-ramp and dived dangerously in front of us.

The car braked sharply but, and most crucially, it did not request the driver to intervene. This caused a great deal of excitement. Our hosts were both freaked out by the near-miss but also very clearly thrilled at how the car had responded. At all times a computer rendition of what the car was “seeing” was displayed on a screen, and it was unerringly accurate. After a few kilometres, the car, as instructed by a routeprogrammed into the satellite navigation, took an offramp and came to a stop at a traffic light, at which point the driver retook control of it.

It was a glimpse of the near future. Lexus says autonomous Toyotas will be on the road in 2020, when the Japanese capital will host the Olympic Games, and which the Japanese motor industry has collectively pin-pointed as an opportunity to showcase Japanese automotive tech. 

At an event after the drive, I managed to spend some time with people working on the project, and they all had a similar refrain – that there is much work to be done, specifically on matters of ethics and that difficult question – to what extremes will we programme a car to go to protect its occupants? The feeling was reminiscent of a conversation I had with Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche a couple of years ago in southern France – he told me that if he had the
opportunity to write the guidelines and laws surrounding autonomous cars, he’d turn down the offer.

It’s clear from my time with Lexus in Tokyo that the technology is only half the battle – and matters of infrastructure standardisation (required for the car to
“see” what’s going on, and of particular concern for the launch of such cars in SA), law, ethics and liability are farfrom being resolved. At Toyota they freely admit this. It does all nonetheless present itself as a huge opportunity for the industry, which is really re-imagining what a car is.

There will always be cars that require a driver – apart from anything else because of the very important, very human fact that sometimes people get into a car and might not know where they’re going, or that they want to get lost, or follow an interesting-lookingroad. Sometimes we just want to go for a drive.
And yet, of course, it would be nice to get some work done on the commute too, wouldn’t it? The Lexus of the near future will offer these options, proving, once again, that those who have declared the death of the car are as wrong as ever. The most liberating device ever invented just keeps getting better. Well played Toyota, I say.

February 2016