Self-driving cars need standards, but whose?

There are signs that autonomous cars have arrived - and may be driving our city streets

The PC revolution, the internet boom, the smartphone economy — all were propelled along by a common set of technological standards. So will a standard platform or operating system be necessary to get autonomous cars rolling, too?

“There is certainly no doubt that many carmakers have expressed the idea that a more standardised platform would be attractive,” said John Wall, a senior vice-president at QNX, which develops software that is used in millions of vehicles today.

Car companies have come to realise that existing in-car systems, with their tangled layers of software and morass of hundreds of embedded processors, are slow and overly complex by today’s computing standards. If autonomous cars are ever to become a reality, they will require even more powerful, more fully integrated and upgradable computing platforms, designers say.

“The feedback we hear is that the number of chips, the amount of wire — an Audi has over six miles of wire in it — is excessive,” said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at the chip maker Nvidia, which is promoting its own autonomous driving platform.

A more centralised approach could bring huge cost savings by reducing the number of processors used in a car and thus reducing the need for the cabling among those processors. Less wiring would also lower a car’s weight to improve fuel economy, Shapiro said.

Nvidia is currently working with several automakers, including Audi, which plans to have its first self-driving vehicles on the road in 2020.

A common automotive platform could also make it easier to develop new software and safety systems for self-driving cars. “The goal is to reduce the cost of bringing innovation to the mass market,” said Eric Montague, a senior director at the speech recognition company Nuance.

There are increasing signs that autonomous cars have arrived — and may be driving our city streets sooner than we think.

Montague said the challenge today is that every car has a unique constellation of electronic control units, sensors and microphones. The software must be specially tailored to each model.

There is no shortage of companies vying to become the equivalent for self-driving cars of the Windows/Intel standard for PCs. Chip makers like Nvidia — as well as Intel — hope to establish their hardware as the new brains behind autonomous vehicles. Delphi, QNX and Waymo (the former Google self-driving project) are looking to put their software front and centre as the operating system of choice. Each wants to sell its own car platform to automakers.

Some auto companies are embracing new partnerships. BMW is working with Intel, Mobileye and Here to bring self-driving cars to the road and plans to start testing such vehicles this year. Ford is working closely with QNX, a BlackBerry subsidiary, on the software needed for the vehicles it is testing. Fiat Chrysler has built a new experimental fleet of minivans for Waymo.

The traditional automotive culture, however, has emphasised independence. And some industry experts point to economic factors that argue against settling on a standard platform. Being dependent on a single vendor can mean higher prices.

“Automakers don’t want to rely on Apple or Google,” said Glen DeVos, vice-president for software and services at Delphi. “But they also don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time.”

Emblematic of that carmaker culture is Hyundai, which is mostly going it alone in working on its self-driving entry. The company recently demonstrated how far it has come, ferrying journalists in Las Vegas around in a self-driving version of its Ioniq electric compact car. Hyundai, which likes to emphasise that it even makes its own steel, has developed its own platform, striving for affordability.

“You don’t have to use a common system,” said Cason Grover, senior group manager for vehicle technology planning innovation at Hyundai. “We don’t want to go down one path that hinders us in the future from introducing new innovations.”

Bosch, which supplies safety and technology systems to automakers, including its own self-parking technology, acknowledges that a single, one-size-fits-all system would be easier to work with. “But it would be a killer for innovation,” said Detlef Zerfowski, vice-president for automotive system integration at Bosch.

Douglas L Davis of Intel, recently charged with spearheading that company’s new self-driving car platform, Go, said, “Given the amount of computing power necessary for autonomous driving, we think it can benefit from greater commonality and predictable interfaces.”

“Mobileye already has the computer vision, for example,” he said. “So if the technology is good, why re-engineer it and take two to three years to get it into a product?”

Which design philosophy one chooses can have significant repercussions when it comes to the security of robotic cars, evoking visions of hackers causing mayhem by crashing cars and trucks into each other at highway speeds. 

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