Fully Automated Cars in 2030
South Korea’s Hyundai Motor recently said some of the company’s cars would be capable of driverless operation by 2020. Hyundai is the latest auto manufacturer to claim an interest in commercializing self-driving cars, with many of the major automakers already boasting that they are developing cars that will operate without human control.
It is too soon to know how far Hyundai, who is just now catching up with some of early leaders in the field, will have progressed towards creating a fully self-driving automobile by 2020. Hyundai has said that while it expects to begin commercializing the driverless cars in 2020, later stages, including fully autonomous cars, could take up to a decade to complete. According to the Korea Herald, a Hyundai spokesperson said:
“We aim to provide partially automated driving in 2015, highly automated driving in 2020 and fully automated driving in 2030.”
Today, Hyundai, like several other car makers including Honda, General Motors, Nissan and Mercedes, is already manufacturing cars with a limited degree of driverless features. In addition, several leading technology companies, including Apple and Google, have also claimed to be developing the technology necessary to create autonomous vehicles.
Safety for Pedestrians
One of the current autonomous features Hyundai Motor has already put into some of its top lines, including the Genesis, is a mechanism that programs the car to stop should a pedestrian closely cross its path. Other features found in some of today’s cars are rear-facing cameras, hazard sensors, and operating systems, for example Apple, with their CarPlay, and Google, whose vehicle operating system is called Android Auto.
Despite these early (but important) developments, many industry analysts do not anticipate driverless cars hitting the road in any real numbers until the mid-2020s. This is due, in part, to regulatory obstacles.