Automakers on the Road to Self-Driving Cars at Consumer Electronics Show

Forget 80-inch screens or wi-fi-connected blenders. At the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it’s the automakers who are dominating the conversation.

Brands like Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Toyota used the annual show — expected to draw around 160,000 people this week — to highlight the rapidly approaching self-driving car, as well as in-car apps and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

“CES is a place where automakers can reach an entire new audience of consumers who are looking for what’s next,” said Costantine Samaras, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “Even if it’s just at the concept level, there’s a lot of spillover for technology up and down an automaker’s supply chain.”

The concept car was exactly what Mercedes-Benz brought to this year’s event. Mercedes Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche on Monday unveiled a radical self-driving concept dubbed the F 015 Luxury in Motion.

The low-slung oddity highlights what Mercedes thinks its cars could look like — and how they could function — in just 15 years. The large sedan holds four people, who can sit facing one another in lounge-style seating while the car drives itself.

Toyota — which used last year’s CES to show off a self-driving prototype — used this year’s show to talk hydrogen. The company announced that 5,600 of its patents related to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and refueling stations will be free to any competitor that wants to use them.

“The first-generation hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, launched between 2015 and 2020, will be critical, requiring a concerted effort and unconventional collaboration,” Toyota Senior Vice President Bob Carter said. Toyota will bring the hydrogen-powered Mirai sedan to the U.S. market in October.

Other automakers used CES to offer a look at the near future of autonomous cars.

Audi was the first automaker to get a permit from the state of California to test self-driving cars on public roads in 2014. Like an eager 16-year-old, the automaker used this new permit to drive autonomously from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas in a prototype A7.

Per current law, the car drove the 560-mile journey with a specially licensed person in the driver and passenger seats. Despite driving at night and in heavy rain at speeds up to 70 mph on public roads, the trip was trouble-free, Audi said.

Luxury automakers in particular will face a challenge as self-driving cars become mainstream. When they do, automakers and analysts alike expect fewer traffic jams, safety improvements and reduced greenhouse gases.

But self-driving cars are likely to begin a transition from a product owned by an individual to an on-demand, subscription-based service.

It’s not just high-dollar automakers with an eye on self-driving cars. During his keynote address Tuesday, Ford CEO Mark Fields made it clear that an autonomous Ford in the future was a certainty. But he said his company would take its time and make sure that the technology was approachable for everyone.

Technology is hardly the only hurdle for self-driving cars. There are knotty regulatory challenges (test vehicles are currently allowed on public roads in just four states); data-privacy issues, since these cars accumulate massive amounts of information about how they’re used and where they go; and ethical issues, like how to program a car to react when a collision is unavoidable.

“We’re in the Wild West of autonomous-vehicle law and policy,” said Samaras of Carnegie Mellon University. “The danger is a 50-states strategy where every one is different and automakers are locked into a less progressive path.”

Despite transportation policy traditionally moving very slowly, Samaras says he’s optimistic that automakers’ rapid development of self-driving cars will speed up policy change.

“These are surmountable challenges,” he said.

In the meantime, Ford is conducting 25 experiments around the globe on how transportation is evolving with technology. Fields said there’s an on-demand, minute-by-minute car-sharing program in London; a partnership with an organization in Africa that maintains a fleet of vehicles used to deliver doctors and medical care to remote villages while simultaneously mapping the area; and a cloud-based system in Atlanta that uses sensors already on many new Fords to gather data on open parking spaces.

Such a discussion is exactly why Ford has been coming to CES for the last eight years, Fields said.

“For us, it’s a way to showcase our innovations,” he said. “We want to be viewed as part of this community.”

This article appeared in print in the January 8th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.