On Oct 26, chipmaker Intel Inc listed its auto chips subsidiary, Mobileye Global. The firm that Intel bought in 2017 is a key player in the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) as well as autonomous vehicle (AV) applications. Among its customers are Germany’s BMW and Volkswagen, Japan’s Nissan Motors, Korea’s Kia Motors and Hyundai Motors as well US auto giants General Motors and Ford Motor Co. In the four weeks since its IPO,
In the science fiction movie, Back to the Future, which first hit the cinema screens in 1985, followed by Part II and Part III sequels in 1989 and 1990, an eccentric scientist called Dr Emmett Brown and his teenage friend Marty McFly time-travel on a flying DeLorean sports car to 2015. Futurologists who helped the movie’s scriptwriters imagined a flying car that was not autonomous, so the DeLorean had a steering wheel. When the first stories about the imminent arrival of driverless cars started appearing in the mainstream media in 2015, the timeline for self-driving vehicles was thought to be seven to 10 years — somewhere between 2022 and 2025 — followed by flying cars, without steering wheels, arriving before the turn of the decade in 2030.
Over the last seven years, readers of this column have read my take on driverless or autonomous vehicles, or robots on wheels, in a range of stories from the Internet of Things to electric vehicles (EVs). Sometimes I have been guilty of being a tad too optimistic about the timeline of such a seismic change and on other occasions I have carefully cited lots of caveats like regulatory factors which can slow down the adoption of self-driving vehicles. The reality is that the driverless riding experience is a work in progress, and completely self-driving cars without steering are still years away.
