[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong (홍진주)] When people think of self-driving cars today, they often think first of Tesla or Waymo. But the history of autonomous driving goes back to the 1970s, long before those companies emerged. The roots of today’s robotaxis and advanced driver assistance systems began in Japanese laboratories, on German autobahns and in U.S. university labs.
On June 4 (local time), electric vehicle outlet InsideEVs reported that one of the world’s first autonomous test vehicles was developed in 1977 at Japan’s Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. Using 2 roof-mounted cameras, it detected lane markings and drove on its own, with a top speed of about 30 kph. Its performance was limited, but it is seen as an important milestone because it drove using only in-vehicle technology, without wire guidance or remote control.
A full-fledged technological leap took place in Germany. A research team led by German engineer Ernst Dickmanns developed an autonomous test vehicle called VaMoRs, based on a Mercedes-Benz van, in the mid-1980s.
The vehicle used cameras, sensors and a computer control system to steer, accelerate and brake on its own. In 1987, it drove autonomously for more than 20 km on a German autobahn before it opened, reaching a top speed of 96 kph. The computing power used at the time was lower than that of today’s smartwatches.
Europe later advanced the technology further through a large joint research project called EUREKA Prometheus. Test vehicles based on the Mercedes S-Class could keep their lane and change lanes on highways, while also tracking the position and speed of surrounding vehicles in real time.
In 1995, a Mercedes vehicle succeeded in traveling 95 percent of a roughly 1,600 km route between Munich in Germany and Copenhagen in Denmark in autonomous mode. It reached a top speed of 180 kph.
These research results later fed into mass-produced car technology. Mercedes-Benz in 1998 fitted the S-Class with the world’s first mass-produced adaptive cruise control system, called Distronic.
In the United States, universities and defense research institutions led the development of autonomous driving. Carnegie Mellon University in 1995 conducted a cross-country experiment in a modified minivan, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held autonomous driving competitions in the 2000s to spur technological progress. In particular, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge is seen as the starting point of the modern autonomous driving industry. Stanford University’s Stanley completed a desert course of about 212 km without human intervention, surprising the industry.
In 2007, the Urban Challenge was held in a city environment. The technology and talent built up there later flowed into autonomous driving companies such as Google, Uber and Waymo.
Silicon Valley commercialized autonomous driving technology after that. Google began its autonomous driving project in 2009, and the business was spun off as Waymo in 2016. Tesla also announced the introduction of Full Self-Driving (FSD) hardware in 2016, but the actual FSD beta service began on a limited basis years later.
Robotaxis and autonomous driving technology in operation today are not the product of a single company working alone. They are closer to the combined result of achievements accumulated over decades through Japan’s early test vehicles, Germany’s highway autonomous driving research, and U.S. university and DARPA projects.
Despite technological advances, most vehicles sold to general consumers still remain at a level that requires driver supervision. Uncrewed autonomous driving services also operate only in some cities and limited areas, prompting an assessment that challenges still remain before a fully autonomous era arrives.