237who drives the CAr?
cooperative ACC, for which V2V communication will be necessary.
e infrastructure will not need to change much, because drivers
can already get information about local trac regulations, trac
congestion, roadwork, and the like via the navigation system or any
other information source. Perhaps roadside systems could be placed
on the road to guide autonomous driving, especially on highway
ramps. is semiautonomous driving allows autonomous driving of
the car on certain roads with noncomplex trac situations, such
as highways, but not in places with more complex trac situa-
tions, such as cities. Scientists consider that this will be realistic by
about 2020 (Visbeek & Van Renswouw, 2008, see also the SATRE
Project). e expected result of this semiautonomous driving is that
road safety on highways will increase, that trac congestion will
be partly mitigated, especially in shock wave trac congestion, and
that cars will become more fuel ecient. During autonomous driv-
ing, the driver can read a book, use the Internet, have breakfast, and
so on.
Fully autonomous driving will not be a realistic picture before
2020, even though this is predicted by several car manufacturers.
For example, Nissan promised in 2013 to deliver the rst “commer-
cially viable” self-driving cars by 2020.* Given the development in the
eld of car robotics, it seems inevitable that the autonomous car will
become commonplace, but a more likely estimate is that these systems
will function around 2030. Signicant technical obstacles must be
overcome before the autonomous car can safely drive on public roads.
Operating an autonomous car on public roads is more complex than
ying an airplane, because there are more and closer interactions with
often unpredictable objects, such as nonautonomous cars, pedestrians,
cyclists, animals, trash, and potholes (Litman, 2014), and developers
have to solve the weather-related problems. A natural move toward
the introduction of fully autonomous vehicles will be the launch of
short-range vehicles that provide local mobility at low speeds and in
relatively controlled environments. Such an approach is planned by
Milton Keynes, a British city in which 100 electric autonomous vehi-
cles will be installed between 2015 and 2017 to run between the city’s
*
http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/releases/nissan-announces- unprecedented-
autonomous-drive-benchmarks.