Motorway autonomy stuck in cost jam but inching forward

The system uses 35 sensors, including the lidar sensor, as well as a high-definition map and back-up steering and brakes in case something fails. The total cost to the buyer is €5950 (£4995).

The fight now is to reduce the cost of the sensors while still ensuring a precision over and above that of the average driver, measured in the number of times that a car asks the human behind the wheel to take back control. 

“Even if you just want to match human-level statistics, we're talking about tens of thousands of hours between interventions,” said Shashua. “To give an idea of where the industry is today, let's say Tesla’s Full Self Driving system, it's about five to 10 hours between interventions.”

Suppliers like Qualcomm and Mobilieye are convinced that is possible but warn that that consumers won’t get on board until they’re offered something genuinely transformative.

“Level three is not usable right now,” said Shashua. “You need to pass a threshold of usability in order to create the revolution, meaning 130kph [81mph], changing lanes, no lead vehicles, all conditions, day and night.”

Both BMW’s and Mercedes’ level-three systems are essentially traffic-jam pilots, ensuring plenty frustration for drivers forced to abandon video calls or movies to take over as the car breaks the boundaries of its operation domain. 

The firms are lifting some of the restrictions as they gain confidence in the technology. For example, Mercedes recently announced it will raise the highway speed of Drive Pilot early this year for customers in Germany from 60kph (37mph) to 95kph (59mph).

Mobileye said its Chauffeur system, designed for Audi to use on a new model in 2027, will lift far more of those restrictions and offer a 130kph (81mph) speed limit.

That level of usability would create demand strong enough that customers would be willing to pay for the extra tech, reckons Mobileye’s lidar partner, Innoviz.

“I would argue that the $500 lidar is not the problem,” Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf told Autocar. 

One slowing factor is that car makers want to ensure they’ve got a complete autonomous platform ready in the wings, with all the software, intelligence and computing power to easily upgrade it.

“They want to see a path from level two to level three; they don't want a dead-end solution,” said Nico Stock, automotive product director at Qualcomm.

That’s what Qualcomm and BMW have been working on together, but the level three side of that is still a way off.

“The sensors have to get cheaper, but also the systems have to have so much redundancy that they have to be developed in a different way, because they have to be prepared to be react,” Frank Weber, head of development at BMW, told Autocar at CES. “The process is so different between level two and level two plus.”

Weber predicted it would take “a half-vehicle generation” – so roughly three years – before level-three autonomy became available on mainstream cars based on the Neue Klasse platform.

Qualcomm reckons its can already program a car to driver autonomously in highway situations, and the hard graft now needs to come from the car maker. “Level 3 is mainly an OEM vehicle problem," said Stock.

It’s a problem they need to solve however, if they want to continue to keep up with China. There the inclusion of lidar is almost commonplace and sophisticated driver assistance is a huge selling point.

“It’s become something to brag about. It used to be how much horsepower you’ve got; now it’s how many lidars you have,” Stock said.

China has yet to authorise level-three autonomy, but it’s only a matter of time, the industry believes, as more companies are handed testing licences.

European car makers are marching to a rhythm set by China as they try to shore up eroding market share lost to tech-first Chinese brands. “Essentially China is going to be driving this,” said Stock.