youhe journey in an autonomous Nissan through Woolwich, south-east London, starts off smoothly: equipped with cameras and sensors, the electric car confidently handles pedestrian crossings, vans that cut into its lane without warning and even jaywalkers.
Then an unexpected obstacle appears: a stone the size of a football, which falls from the back of a truck in the middle of the road. The specially trained safety driver quickly takes the wheel and regains control to avoid a nasty creaking noise.
It’s hardly a major incident, and it’s the only human intervention during five miles of heavy traffic at a demonstration of the ServCity research program being carried out by the carmaker and its partners in London. However, it highlights the difficulties autonomous driving technology faces before it can go mainstream, especially on Britain’s busy and often chaotic urban roads.
“We’re on a long-term journey,” says Matthew Ewing, Nissan’s vice president of vehicle engineering in Europe.
Hands-free driving is still banned in the UK, although the government pledged last summer to allow the first driverless cars. on UK roads by 2025. Automakers are racing to develop the technology that will allow them to launch driverless taxis and, eventually, personal vehicles that can travel anywhere without human intervention.
All the big auto companies are eyeing self-driving cars, while startups like Alphabet-owned Waymo and General Motors-owned Cruise have also invested heavily. Cruise has taken paying customers in driverless “robotaxis” in San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin in the US. In London, startups Oxbotica, Wayve and the Academy of Robotics have carried out self-driving car tests.
The ServCity project, which has received £7m from the UK government and is coming to an end next month, is looking at ways to improve performance in cities in particular. The project has covered 1,600 miles on a 2.7-mile route around Woolwich with 270 cameras and other sensors. They allow the team to collect data, but also to experiment with features like giving the car early warning of obstacles, including parked buses that block the lane ahead, even when they’re beyond line of sight.
A Nissan car has already shown what is possible in the UK. Two years ago, a Leaf drove 230 miles using autonomous technology from the company’s technical center in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, to its manufacturing plant in Sunderland, where the model is built. Most of that travel on predictable highways was managed by computer, but safety drivers still had to intervene a few times. Taking the next step towards total autonomy is proving difficult.
“We probably have 80% capacity, but that last 20% will take some time,” says Ewing.
Nissan and its rivals have been gradually adding autonomous capabilities over 20 years, such as maintaining a safe distance from the car in front on highways and keeping in lane. However, the transition from those level 1 or 2 driver assistance systems to level 3, when the car is in full control at least part of the time, can be very difficult.
after newsletter promotion
London is also a particularly demanding environment, at least when compared to the wide boulevards of the US or the orderly traffic of Yokohoma, Japan, where Nissan is based.
Autonomous driving capabilities are divided by the standardization body SAE in six levels: 0 for no autonomy and level 5 for full automation (where you could fall asleep and wake up at your destination). The cutting edge right now is pushing level 3: cars that are capable of driving themselves, but could ask the driver to intervene at any time.
Even Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk has promised robotic taxis for years, still says its “full autonomous driving” software can only provide “active guidance and assisted driving under your active supervision.” The automaker has faced criticism for its claims of “full autonomous driving,” including in an ad from a wealthy critic at this year’s Super Bowl, and a US justice department investigation.
Ewing says the UK is still in a “good position” relative to other countries, although it must keep up with the EU as the technology approaches mainstream adoption and more features are used in cars for the sale.
“I think it will be a gradual process, step by step,” he says. “It will become more and more of a normal feeling.”
