Apple Made a Splash in Cars in 2014. It Is No Longer the Star of the Smart Car

夏雨青 · 2015-01-10 · English translation

Judging by what we saw at CES, self-driving cars will reach you this year

At first glance, CES 2015, the International Consumer Electronics Show, looked more like an auto show. At the main venue, the Las Vegas Convention Center, carmakers and parts suppliers took up most of the ground floor of the North Hall. BMW's pavilion filled the entire South Plaza, Audi and Volkswagen each built a huge test-drive area in the Central Plaza, and the North Plaza held a "Car Intelligence" zone sponsored by Bosch.

The automakers were not alone. At the booths of chipmakers such as Qualcomm, Intel and Nvidia, the most eye-catching exhibits were also beautiful, expensive cars, there to show off intelligent driving systems sold on the strength of their chips.

Nearly every car brand you can name was at CES. This year's show drew more automakers than ever, but it was not the first time cars had taken center stage.

Audi showed several new cars at CES 2014 | Image source: LA Times

At CES in early 2014, Google's Android Auto was the star. Google announced the Open Automotive Alliance (OAA), bringing together Audi, GM, Hyundai and Honda to put Android into in-car entertainment systems. In the demo, once you connected an Android phone, you could use Android maps and navigation, music, messaging and other functions optimized for the car.

Apple followed in March 2014 with its own in-car infotainment system, CarPlay. Like Android Auto, it connects to your phone in the car and works closely with iOS, letting you use navigation, music, messaging and third-party apps on the dashboard display.

From then on, your car no longer had to be stuck with its old, outdated, closed entertainment system. CarPlay and Android Auto stood in the spotlight, and for a while they looked like the future of the car.

A little over half a year later, that future no longer seems to matter. CarPlay and Android Auto barely come up at press conferences, and in the glitzy booths they are either nowhere to be seen or squeezed into a corner where they are easy to miss.

At every booth I asked the staff what this year's focus was. Nine times out of ten, they pointed to a futuristic machine at the center of the booth, one you could only call sexy. "Self-driving, of course," they all said.

Mercedes unveiled the F 015 self-driving concept car at CES 2015

This does not mean CarPlay or Android Auto are going away. Audi, Mercedes, Hyundai, Ford... nearly all of them will launch next-generation models that support smartphones in 2015. Slower players such as Fiat Chrysler have not yet shown a prototype in public, but they signed partnerships long ago, and mass production is only a matter of time.

That is exactly the point: what a car's infotainment system is no longer matters. Once carmakers saw what consumers wanted, they partnered with Google or Apple, and the technology will soon spread through low- and mid-range cars the way the CD player did. You do not even have to choose between Google and Apple. Both sit on top of each carmaker's own user system, and most carmakers support both.

In Volkswagen's booth demo, you can pick Google from the main menu if you use an Android phone; the option right next to it is Apple CarPlay, which will please your partner who uses an iPhone. Volkswagen even offers a third smart system, called MirrorLink.

Volkswagen cars come with the MirrorLink system built in | Image source: Volkswagen

To put it more plainly: these systems do very similar things, and they work in much the same way. For the consumer who ends up buying the car, since both can be used side by side, the differences between them hardly matter. The fight over car infotainment systems ends here. In the end, it is only a small part of the many systems in a car.

In 2015, our attention returns to what the "car" itself can do. At the booths of automakers, suppliers and chipmakers, every gleaming concept car pointed to the same idea: "self-driving." Each company showed off its self-driving technology in a highly futuristic, dazzling way.

Audi drove an A7 concept car all the way from Palo Alto, California, to Las Vegas, a trip of 900 kilometers. Apart from a few towns where local rules got in the way, the driver never touched the steering wheel.

In fact, at any speed from 0 to 110 kilometers per hour, the human driver does not have to do anything. The car's four radar sensors scan a full 360 degrees, and laser detectors add more information about obstacles nearby.

The Prologue concept car at Audi's booth is fitted with a self-driving system

This is self-driving straight out of science fiction: no one at the wheel, automatic lane changes and overtaking, automatic navigation, and automatic braking to avoid collisions.

Audi engineer Christian Meves told QDaily that the system was developed entirely in-house: "The A7 concept car's technology is still some time away from going on sale. But this year we will release the 2016 Q7, which has some self-driving functions."

In a traffic jam, this Q7 will adjust its speed to follow the car ahead and stay in its lane. The function works only on highways and at speeds below 65 kilometers per hour.

The obstacle recognition system on a BMW i3 prototype

BMW's main display in the South Plaza was also about self-driving. Dr. Werling, who heads development of the ActiveAssist system, sat in the driver's seat of an i3 prototype while I sat beside him. He tried to hit an obstacle by driving straight at it, turning into it and reversing into it, and each time the system braked before impact.

The underlying collision-avoidance technology has been in testing for years, and the i3 demo program was built by three successive teams led by Dr. Werling. "Our system remembers where obstacles are. When I drive into an area the sensors can't cover, the obstacles it detected earlier stay on the map it has built."

On the other side of the plaza, BMW showed automatic parking. Using an app on a Samsung Gear S smartwatch, a BMW staff member summoned a car by voice. Another i3, with no one at the wheel, slowly drove up from the far side of the lane.

It was not just high-end brands such as Audi and BMW. Hyundai, Volkswagen and Ford all showed partially self-driving functions. Most of these systems can do one or more of the following: avoid collisions, follow the car ahead, change lanes, recognize objects, read speed-limit signs, and so on.

The night before CES officially opened, Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of Mercedes-Benz, unveiled the F 015 concept car at the show.

Besides its sci-fi design and gesture control, the F 015's biggest draw is fully autonomous driving. In self-driving mode, the steering wheel moves out of the way, and the two front seats swivel 180 degrees to face the rear passengers, like the seating in an old four-wheeled carriage.

Zetsche closed his speech that evening with these words: "This is the night before the world's largest consumer electronics show opens, and we have come here to look to the future. And this (the F 015) is what we at Mercedes believe is the future of the car in design, concept and communication. Our experiments in self-driving began in 1950. The traditional American dream is about freedom and dreams, and people have dreamed of self-driving cars since 1950. Mercedes made it a reality for vehicles to move without a 'horse,' and we are committed to making driverless cars a reality too."

Still, the F 015 stands for a distant future. Today, the only Mercedes cars that achieve partial self-driving are the S-Class. Its Intelligent Drive system can avoid collisions, help keep the car in the center of its lane and follow the car ahead in traffic jams. In the driving simulator demo at the booth, these functions felt smooth and natural.

That is a big step forward, but the S-Class's functions count at most as driver assistance. The fact is that the concept "self-driving systems" every carmaker is showing today are very different from the cars they will launch in the next 12 months.

Mercedes used a driving simulator to show the S-Class's partial self-driving functions

Between full human control and full automation, self-driving is divided into five stages. Under the standard published by the US NHTSA, they are: no automation, function-specific automation, combined-function automation (partial automation), limited self-driving automation, and full self-driving automation (that is, driverless). Standards differ slightly from country to country, but the principles are broadly the same.

Every production model we will see in 2015 reaches only the "combined-function automation" stage, which is why it is called partial self-driving. Its signature functions are collision prevention, following the car ahead and staying in the center of the lane.

This is not because self-driving systems are especially hard to build. The auto industry has been researching self-driving for more than 40 years. In the 1980s, a lab at Carnegie Mellon University built a system that achieved "limited self-driving automation," and the high-end car brands each have one or two driverless cars capable of driving themselves completely.

At CES 2014, BMW showed a 235i that can drift on its own | Image source: BMW

There are many reasons self-driving has been slow to reach consumers. Dr. Werling told me that the i3 concept car BMW demonstrated this time uses four laser sensors made by IBEO. According to public information, each of these sensors costs more than US$20,000. The cost of sensors keeps more carmakers from building "partially automated" cars.

Jonathan Cohen, who is in charge of self-driving systems at Nvidia, said: "The problem is simple: driverless driving is just hard. The driving environment is extremely complex, and the system has to read a situation the way a person would... Even if you train it on a huge amount of data, when it meets a situation it has never seen, it may get it wrong."

Audi engineer Meves believes that even if we solved every technical problem today, changing a complex legal system and getting driverless cars onto the road would take at least 10 years.

Taken together, these reasons mean that the fully self-driving car you may imagine is still a long way off. Until then, more self-driving functions, such as collision avoidance, will appear first on high-end cars. Expensive sensors may not come four at a time: the first models might carry two, adding more as costs fall.

It will be several more years before these functions reach the mid-range cars most people can afford. That is how new technology has always spread through the auto industry.

Meanwhile, nearly every link in the auto industry's supply chain is developing its own self-driving system.

The self-driving system developed by Nvidia can recognize vehicles, traffic lights and signs on the road

According to QDaily's interviews, most carmakers spent at least a year and a half to three years developing their current-generation systems. Chipmakers, which traditionally do not build software for cars themselves, are also developing their own systems. Nvidia, best known for graphics processors, showed a Drive PX system based on its X1 chip at this CES; Qualcomm showed a Maserati concept car using its 602A chip, whose system also has self-driving functions; Intel would not say whether its system was developed in-house, though some of its technology comes from third-party software companies such as Seeing Machines. Tier-one supplier TRW develops its self-driving system in-house and makes its own sensors.

Google has its own driverless car too, and it is the one that gets the most press.

Nvidia's Jonathan Cohen told QDaily: "We think there is a lot of value in providing a complete (self-driving) system. As a chipmaker, we can make chips with low power consumption and high processing power, but that is not enough. To make them work, you also need to build the whole software system on top. Especially for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), you need a lot of processing power for image recognition and analysis."

Nvidia is now in talks with several tier-one suppliers about using this software system.

The auto industry has never been known for updating its software quickly. Apple CarPlay and Google Android Auto caught on precisely because old car infotainment systems could not keep up with what consumers wanted.

Car brands spent years improving their user interfaces, but a new car often takes two years to develop, and new technology moves slowly, step by step, from high-end models to low-end ones. For all these reasons, in-car entertainment still can't match a free app on the driver's phone. In the end, internet companies that arrived later took over the entertainment system.

So who will own self-driving, which is far more complex and demands far more from software development? The car companies, the manufacturers, the suppliers, the chipmakers, or... Google?

What else will change in the electronics around you? Read QDaily's other reports from the CES show floor:

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