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CES 2013: Self-driving cars
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Watching a car park is nothing special, until you realize it's the car that's actually doing the parking, not the driver.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, futuristic self-driving cars are on display. It’s an Audi concept vehicle.
“It's your own personal valet parker,” Annie Lien with Audi said.
“So you can press a button on a smartphone and it can drive up to your front door, or let's say you came to a hotel or coming to a shopping center, you can press a button on your smartphone and it'll go through a parking structure and actually find its own parking space and park itself.”
Audi officials say they are testing the concept on the streets of Nevada. The car can take over for you when you hit stop-and-go traffic. It will also keep up with the flow of the traffic while you're behind the wheel, freeing you to check emails or watch a movie.
“We're concentrating on traffic jams on freeways right now, so that would be a stop and go range from zero to 40 miles per hour,” Bjorn Giesler said.
Lexus also showed off an autonomous concept car at CES. This car can drive itself, though developers prefer to think of all the technologies inside acting more like a co-pilot to make you, the human driver, a better driver.
“Our goal is a system that constantly perceives processes and responds to its surroundings,” Mike Templin with Lexus said. “That scans the movement of objects around it, identifies a green light from a red light and measures the trajectory, roll, pitch and yaw of a vehicle as it steers, accelerates and brakes along the most efficient route to its destination.”
No word on if a self-driving car will ever become an everyday reality. The bigger take away is as manufacturers continue to develop these vehicles, some of these technologies will start to trickle down into cars you will be able to buy in just the next few years.
“We're seeing these filter into high end cars already collision warnings, lane departure warnings that kind of thing it basically makes cars safer,” James Meigs with Popular Mechanics said.
Developers predict many of these features could easily hit production models within just the next ten years.