Summary: Germany is opening up A9 Autobahn for testing self driving cars. Previously, German companies couldn't test on the public roads due to regulations. German car companies don't want to depend on Google for autonomous driving technology.
In 1991, I worked for Daimler (Mercedes) in their Advanced Vehicle Research group. We had an abandoned section of Autobahn a few miles outside Stuttgart available for our use, but we also had authorization to test on public highways in autonomous mode. We just had to have a driver seated and paying attention, and had a red panic button on the center console. Pushing the panic button reverted the vehicle control to fully manual. (This was in a large bus-like vehicle, based on the Vario platform, a little larger than a current Sprinter.)
So, while we couldn't test in no-humans onboard mode, we logged hundred of miles in fully autonomous mode.
Technical notes: the programming language was Occam. I'd have to look through my notes to see what the network size was, but the vision system alone (my main focus, no pun intended) was in the low double figures of processors, with most of those being dedicated to variance calculations to find prominent horizontal edges. I seem to recall we processed the video stream at 15 frames per second by the time I left.
A test highway? I thought the highway was the solved problem. Google's car handles the highways so well that they don't even bother testing it on the highways anymore.
Driving on a german highway with autonomous cars has already been done as already as 1996 by Mercedes[1]. But same as with the google cars they used very special hardware which would be too expensive for production use. The current challenges are to make autonomous driving happening with fewer and cheaper sensors.
Also having a real highway allows testing scenarios like partially blocked street due to construction, testing at night, with rain, with snow, etc. Google's cars are currently not working under such conditions so there are still many problems to solve.
In my experience there is no significant difference between an Autobahn and a North American highway regarding the difficulty of navigation. The tricky parts are the ramps, exits, construction zones and merging, and they occur roughly with the same frequency.
I think the test track is more about testing technology which will be installed at the roadside.
Speaking as a German who spend quite some time driving in other European countries with speed limits, the difference is massive.
Elsewhere most people tend to drive at more or less at the maximum speed allowed. This makes for a very relaxed, easy albeit boring experience.
In Germany the difference in speed between the cars are a lot bigger, even in areas with a speed limit. In combination with the Rechtsfahrgebot (a law that makes driving in the right-most lane mandatory, unless you are overtaking or there is no space) you are constantly overtaking trucks and other cars, while others do so to you as well. Overtaking itself requires accelaration often time going beyond the actual speed limit so as not to slow down others too much which can be dangerous.
Furthermore you have to constantly monitor traffic so as not to be trapped on the right lane, if a larger group of cars comes up from behind, which happens frequently.
I highly doubt that current autonomous cars are capable of that to a degree, where I wouldn't be annoyed and wanted to take over. Especially at night, when it's raining, snowing, there is fog or a combination of these.
Maybe my standards are too high but whenever I'm driving on the autobahn I get the expression that some drivers didn't get the memo about the Rechtsfahrgebot.
It would be actually interesting to hear about this difference from someone who is working on autonomous cars for both highways and Autobahns. I still wouldn't call the difference 'massive' (at least not in terms of how much the technology would need to advance). Overtaking and avoiding slows down is an issue on highways in other countries too and once it is implemented it could possibly be easily adapted to traffic moving at a faster pace. Being trapped on the right lane happens quite often, but you generally have this problem when the current lane is crowded. It's not a special case for the Autobahn. I agree that the speed difference can be much higher which would possibly require a ToF sensor with higher range than what is currently built into the Google cars (only about 200 m).
Going 100 mph plus in the left lane on the German autobahn you'll be the recipient of flashing signals of grandmothers passing you at 120 if you don't get out of the way fast enough.
The only hard part about that is avoiding cars coming at high speeds from behind. (Though usually these people will be used to slowing down and they actually have to slow down if the car in front of them is legitimately overtaking another one The main responsibility to keep everyone save lies with the fast driving car on the left lane and with cars changing lanes to insure that they are not blocking someone else. Since autonomous cars have no blind spot and should be quite good at estimating distance and speed, presumably better than humans, that should really not be an issue.)
It's not as though you have to drive fast. Most people actually don't drive super fast, they stick to 130 to 160 km/h. You will only occasionally encounter someone going way beyond that. Just because there's no limit doesn't mean people drive at speeds they are uncomfortable with … extended periods at 160 or beyond make me queasy and I tend to stick to 140 or so. That also gets better mileage.
And it's dynamic. Portions will switch from unlimited to limited speed based on weather, construction, or accidents far ahead, giving everyone time to slow down and merge away from a blocked lane.
And drivers actually follow the signs. As an American driver it's an amazing thing to see.
This doesn't matter at all to Google's cars. They are designed to ignore the speedlimit in favour of the real speed of traffic around it[1], as it has been proven to be far safer than slowing down. It's currently caped at 16km/h over but this is an arbitrary limit.
Still, if the highway were only autonomous networked vehicles, you could do some other cool things, like allow faster speeds and more throughput because the cars could be spaced closer together.
I suspect they will rather limit the speed for autonomous vehicles since there's no limit, but above 130 km/h you will be partly guilty for accidents even if it wasn't your fault. (So it's a legal issue.)
The A9 is a very interesting choice because it links Munich to Berlin and probably has a lot of business travellers. If they could work while driving, it could be a big selling point.
That's already the case with regular cars. There is no limit so in theory you could drive at 250km/h and it's perfectly legal(I've done it in the middle of the night, it's very cool if the conditions allow it), but if you get into an accident at anything above 130km/h you might be held liable for not driving at an appropriate speed.
You still need to account for the possibility of hardware (and software!) failures - so there's not as much slack there as one might think. But yes, good point regarding throughput.
As for speed, not so sure. You end up with (more) problems with traffic noise, and you end up with a lot more fuel consumption. The question at the end of the day with speed is political in nature though.
But not for Volkswagen (Audi is in Ingolstadt, which the A9 passes), BMW (Munich, also passed by the A9) and Daimler (they're further away, but still close).
I guess they're not interested in sharing their livelyhood with Google, so they have to reinvent that particular automatic wheel...
They've been at it since (long) before google even existed and have had self driving cars for nearly two decades. The thing that needs to be done is to expand the conditions under which it works and to improve the reliability because an intervention is a lot worse than having to do an evasive maneuver when you're already driving.
The reliability thing is the big issue though. It should be possible to scale that transputer system down to the equivalent of a couple of smartphones by now, but the luxury brand car manufacturers are still very reluctant to add anything automatic to their autos. For about 3 years they're parking automatically, and for a year or so they follow the current track on the road, yay. That's far from what they did in 1996.
Having that test strip will help sort out the issues, increase confidence and through that, increase political will to sort out liability issues and so on.
Even Mercedes is now promoting autonomous vehicles with "you may have better things to do on the road" (at CES, I think). That was completely unheard of even two years ago (where they pretty much dismissing the Google effort because it spoils the "fun of driving" and who would want that?)
So yes, Google plays a big part in that current effort by pushing these companies to do what they're able to.
Just like Tesla makes everyone else consider electrical cars now, even though there were concepts of that going back to the early 90s (and mass produced electrical cars in the early 20th century).
Both demonstrate that the time is right, and now the others want to be part of that, without becoming reliant on those new-comers. Markets at work.
From German pride (which is cars and soccer) over privacy concern to plain industry support (expect Germany to support those compan... I meant to say, efforts with €€€), there are many incentives to not go with anything Google, except maybe as supporting system (eg. their maps data, together with others).
A highway in California and Nevada is a solved problem. A highway in Germany not so: Rain and snow are pretty much normal here (as in about a 0.5 chance you need to cope with it for any given day).
Since this week the Dutch national road traffic agency (RDW) is allowed to grant exemptions to companies that want to do tests with self driving cars and trucks on Dutch roads.
So the Netherlands is also going for self driving cars.
I won't be surprised if our grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we drove cars ourselves ;)
I would like to do the following:
- tell the car to drive to work
- actually autonomously drive on the HW, while I work ( I have 5Gb included on my LTE VF abo so I can do all my work remotely)
- keep all the speed limits ( I am personally driving like crazy, in order to minimize the driving time )
- drop me on the curbside
- go find a parking place :)
After work: - calling my car to pick me up
- drive home, autonomously, while I slack on the internet or sleep
- wake me up when entering the garage.
at this moment I can hire with 450 euro a month a chauffeur that does all that. But I would buy in a second a car with such a possibility.
EDIT: formatting