"Audi
demonstrated a car that can park itself in a garage after dropping you
off"
Most of what’s
on display at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is the same as what
was on display at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Phones, TV
sets, accessories. Minus Microsoft, of course.
But here and there, some first-time technologies made their appearance. One big one: self-driving cars.
Google, of course, is at the forefront of this technology; it’s had a successful
self-driving car experiment running for some time now. (Actually, it has 12 such cars now.) Google wasn’t at C.E.S.
A few others were, though. There’s something bubbling here.
Audi
demonstrated a car that can park itself in a garage after dropping you
off. (It was the garage of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, in this case.)
And when you return, you can summon the car with a phone app; the car
drives itself from its parking spot to you. That, however, is not so
much a self-aware car as a self-aware garage; it requires that the
garage itself be equipped with special laser guides. And the driving is
very, very slow and controlled (as you would hope).
Audi is also
working on a traffic-jam mode, in which you can take a nap, work or do
some reading as the car handles the slow, patient, touch-and-go edging
through crawling traffic.
Audi says it’s thinking long-term — years away — for these features to become real futures.
Lexus
also held a news conference in which it showed a video of its advanced
active safety research car. It’s more like Google’s project: a
completely autonomous, self-driving car. Lexus says that the point is
safety: that you must be behind the wheel at all times, and that years
of lobbying, demonstrating and building trust lie ahead before these
will be available to consumers.
Frankly, I think we’re on the
right track. Few industries are as heavily regulated as automobiles, so
I’m confident that these things will never see the light of day until
their reliability has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Keep
in mind that the competition for a self-driving car is a person-driven
car — and that, these days, is something truly worth fearing.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/c-e-s-2013-a-genuinely-novel-gadget-the-self-driving-car/
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described Mabel Normand as “Not of this world” perhaps true in the poetic sense if not in a factual one.
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