Toyota, Audi And Nissan Show Reveal Autonomous Car At CES 2017
While it seems that the international car companies are in crisis, these major automakers have a lot going on apart from what meets the public's eye. The CES 2017 offered a glimpse of what will become of the auto industry in a couple of decades.
It is no coincidence that Toyota has chosen this well-versed show on new technologies to present its new Concept-i. It is not only a car robotized to move from one place to another, but also houses a remarkable interior that accommodates an artificial intelligence system capable of interacting and communicating with the user. Reportedly, the system learns the driving habits and the specific transportation needs of each user over time, according to Top Gear.
The fact that this experimental car is capable of being driven is now a reality, but the implications for such AI systems go well beyond the boundaries of just the auto industry. New possibilities to incorporate AI systems will leap technology years ahead than what it might hope to achieve without artificial intelligence, as Engadget states.
Now comes the next contestant. The Nissan Leaf is equipped with a pro-pilot autonomous driving system, another step forward in propelling the arrival of this revolutionary technology in the production of new-generation cars. As the car arrives, Nissan will begin this year tests in cities of Japan with freight cars without drivers, a step to be taken before establishing the service for travelers in 2020.
But the interest of the company in automated driving does not end there. The Renault-Nissan alliance has also unveiled the development of a new vehicle platform, called Seamless Autonomous Mobility - SAM - that uses techniques developed by NASA to fill the problems that may present the absence of human intelligence behind the wheel.
The Audi Q7 autonomous vehicle has been developed by Nvidia, probably the most ambitious and advanced of the presented project. Like the Toyota Concept-i, it bases its automated driving system, called PilotNet, on artificial intelligence. The car is learning and developing its autonomy in function of what the human driver teaches, what in Audi they have baptized as 'Deep Learning'.
The show in Las Vegas stated with full certainty that the vehicle would be available in the market before 2020, and that next year the company will be making its A8 model equipped with the same kind of artificially intelligent technology. However, this will only give the A8 a semi-autonomous status, whereas the fully automated vehicle shall wait a while longer before it makes a heavy arrival.
