Moderation Team
Volkswagen has recently published a video of its CEO, Herbert Diess, riding as a passenger in the company’s first autonomous vehicle prototype. The vehicle is an ID. Buzz AD, which is equipped with self-driving technology developed by VW but not yet offered for sale. The prototype has a safety driver, as it is not yet approved to fully drive itself.
During the brief drive through Munich, right near the center of the city, Diess speaks with Alex Haag, the managing director of Argo Munich, about the way that the self-driving system is designed and what are its biggest challenges now.
Furthermore, we get to see how the system “views” the world around us, as well as to note that VW uses LiDAR, Radar, and cameras to assess the surroundings.
There are also legislative challenges that Volkswagen does not address in this video. Instead, the managing director of Argo Munich explained that the human factor is one of the biggest hurdles the development team faces at the moment.
For example, while human drivers can use their experience and social skills to determine if a person standing by the side of the road intends to cross it or not, the development team found that it is difficult to teach a robot to grasp these delicate aspects of human interaction.
Moreover, there is still the element of surprise, which involves humans doing unpredictable things for unknown reasons. In the latter case, not even human drivers are prepared for that, so do not imagine that replacing all human-driven vehicles with autonomous ones overnight will lead to zero car accidents starting that day.
Instead, each incident will be under heavy scrutiny, and the first fatal accident will make headlines across the world. None of this will be the manufacturer’s fault unless proven otherwise by an investigation, but that is how we imagine it playing out when it happens.
At this point, we should underline that the latter is just an educated guess based on other events that were linked to new technologies being introduced, and these have nothing to do with VW‘s new tech.
Source: www.autoevolution.com
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