Self-driving cars are starting to sprout up faster than weeds. It is important to understand how these vehicles work before I get into more about them. They depend on sensors of many different types to know what obstacles are around them and their position. They use GPS to know their location, radar to know what is around them with Lidar and computers. Lidar is a system used to measure distance to a target. It usually stands for Light Imaging, Detection And Ranging. Other sensors may also be used such as sonar. The US military has decided it would not only be more efficient to have self-driving trucks, but it would also be much safer as army trucks are often targets of attack. If there is no driver in a truck and it is blown up there is no human fatality. The same is true for captured vehicles. The military has decided it would like to relieve soldiers of having to perform boring tasks and driving trucks on long drives is one of those tasks.

There are many companies which are developing driverless vehicles and anyone who thinks this will not happen hasn’t been keeping up with current events. Tesla wants to have a driverless car by 2018 and Elon Musk the head of the company mentioned this often. Many believe he will accomplish making a driverless car since his cars now have almost reached that point, but most don’t think it will happen as fast as he says. Not every company thinks it will be possible to have driverless cars by 2020 and one in particular, the biggest one, Toyota thinks it will be a lot harder task to complete than we think and it will take a lot longer to accomplish. One would think that with all of Toyota’s experience in car manufacture, they know what they are talking about. It boils down to who is going to be correct, the new company Tesla or the biggest established company Toyota? Even with the opinion of Toyota that this will be a lot harder to do, Toyota is attempting to meet the 2020 date, because it can’t take the chance of falling behind in this technology.

All this talk of driverless cars in 2020 seems to ignore the fact Uber and Volvo say they will be putting self-driving cars in the streets of Pittsburgh this year (2017) in August. The cars will be self-driving as I said, but they will have someone behind the wheel just in case of a problem. I have to wonder how people calling for an Uber cab in Pittsburgh in August will feel when it arrives and they realize the man behind the wheel isn’t driving? Google has been working on self-driving vehicles for some time now and the company believes it will be able to meet the 2020 deadline they have set for themselves to get their self-driving vehicles on the road. Google is using a different tactic than the auto companies. They keep increasing autonomous features on their automobiles with the hope of the car become completely autonomous in the future. Google wants to put out a car which is completely autonomous when their first car becomes available.

Some of the car companies doing self-driving development are what we would call luxury car companies. BMW is one of those companies. Their plan seems to be to make a self-driving car in China. Their target date for this is 2021. The company not only wants to create self-driving gasoline powered cars, but also electric ones which they plan to release later, sometime around 2025. Creating driverless cars that work would be quite an accomplishment, but there is one which is even better and that is being pursued by Volvo. They want to make their cars death proof by 2020. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car that nobody dies in no matter what the circumstances? When that is achieved they want to advance to fully driverless cars. Volvo has been known in modern times as a very safe car to drive, so it is not surprising they would have this for their goal. Volvo is also going to conduct a driverless car experiment in China. They are going to ask for 100 volunteers to test driverless Volvo XC90s on the public roads in China. They are not going to stop there either. They plan to do the same in Sweden and England in 2017.

Nissan has announced it has created new technology which will make driverless cars a reality in 2020. This August (2017) a feature will be added to Nissan cars in Japan called ProPILOT. This will allow cars to drive themselves on highways. The system will continuously be updated until the Nissan cars have complete driverless capabilities by 2020. Someone once said talk was cheap and this is still true. It is one thing to develop a car which can drive itself, but quite another to develop a self-driving car which can anticipate every dangerous situation and figure out a solution in a split second. There is also a problem I haven’t discussed and it is the gorilla in the room. It has been proven cars can be hacked since their new features are being controlled by a computer. The cars all have online capability which is precisely what makes them vulnerable. Until a solution if found for this problem we are all at risk, even today. This was proven last year when a test was conducted where a hacker turned off many of a car’s features while it was driving down a road. The engine was even turned off.

The American car companies are also getting into the self-driving business with Ford announcing it should have this capability by 2021. They said while they may not be the first, but they will be the ones which make the system accessible to everyone, not just the buyers of luxury cars. General Motors was a little quieter about their plans, but did announce an investment in a network of on-demand driverless cars. Fiat Chrysler made a deal with Google to supply 100 cars for self-driving testing which in turn should give them access to the Google self-driving technology. This could turn out to be a very cost effective way to get this technology.

Mercedes-Benz has shown it is ready and demonstrated this by having a big rig drive itself on public roads. The system in the truck was called Highway Pilot and executives at the company claim it will be ready for real-world applications by the magic date of 2020. What I find interesting is the fact a search company in China named Baidu, not to be outdone by Google, also has a driverless car and is aiming to have a commercial model ready by 2018, which would put it in the lead.

I guess we will know how all this works out in three years if there is a flood of driverless cars coming out.