Toyota Research Institute CEO: Automakers "not even close" to fully autonomous cars
Technology and automotive companies alike are promising to put self-driving cars on the road within just a few short years, but the Toyota Research Institute's CEO on Wednesday warned the automotive sector is "not even close" to launching fully autonomous vehicles.
Level 5 autonomy, as defined by SAE International, means there's no steering wheel, no brakes and no human required.
"It's a wonderful, wonderful goal, but none of us in the automobile or technology industry are close," Gill Pratt said at CES in Las Vegas. "It's going to take many years of machine learning and many more miles than anyone has logged to achieve... Level 5 autonomy."
Pratt's remarks poured cold water on some recent promises: Ford announced its intention to mass-produce fully-autonomous, Level 5 vehicles by 2021, and Tesla says its Level 5 cars will be ready in 2018.
Pratt noted that Level 4 autonomy is "almost as good" and will have a much shorter timetable for arrival. "TRI believes it's very likely a number of manufacturers will have Level 4 [vehicles] within a decade," he said. Those vehicles will be especially attractive to mobility-as-a-service companies like Uber and Lyft. Those services, he said, may offer the best applications for bringing Level 4 vehicles to market sooner.
Even so, it could be decades, Pratt said, before a significant portion of vehicles are equipped with Level 4 or Level 5 technology.
zdnet.com
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