Fully autonomous driving is one step closer to really landing. Recently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a final rule that self-driving car manufacturers no longer need to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving control systems in order to meet collision standards, which means that car companies can finally abandon the steering wheel that has been used for nearly a hundred years and make great strides towards fully autonomous driving.
While existing regulations do not prohibit automakers from deploying self-driving cars, under NHTSA's old rules, vehicles "must have a driver's seat, a steering wheel and steering lever, or only one passenger seat on the outside of the front row", resulting in car companies having no way to let go of their hands and feet when experimenting with autonomous driving technology.
With no way to abandon the steering wheel, for a long time in the past, even the most aggressive Robotaxi companies needed safety personnel to test autonomous driving technology, which obviously could not fully simulate the environment of fully autonomous driving. There is no doubt that the current NHTSA laws and regulations on autonomous driving have not kept up with the development of technology, so there is this revision of the regulations.
For this policy adjustment, NHTSA also made it clear that "for vehicles completely controlled by the automatic driving system, manual driving control is unnecessary", which shows that in order to adapt to the development of automatic driving technology, NHTSA is also constantly adjusting.
It is worth mentioning that although NHTSA has relaxed the requirements for autonomous driving technology, car companies still need to obtain NHTSA's exemption and comply with corresponding safety regulations to release autonomous vehicles. Not only that, but children are still not allowed to sit in the traditional "driver" position according to NHTSA's requirements, because this position was not designed to protect children in a collision.
Although NHTSA has made it clear that the new regulations can cancel the steering wheel, but before the detailed guidelines are introduced, car companies can not do much for the time being, but NHTSA's operation to modify the regulations has released an important signal to the outside world, that is, the absolute control of humans in car driving has begun to hand over to machines.
Tesla ushered in a major positive?
In fact, with the rapid development of automatic driving technology, in the past one or two years, both relevant countries and autonomous driving companies are constantly blowing the wind, and the restrictions on automatic driving should be gradually relaxed.
At the end of last year, Mercedes-Benz announced that it had successfully passed the approval of the German Federal Motor Vehicle Administration (KBA), becoming the first car company in the world to obtain the L3 level of automatic driving certification of the United Nations "Automatic Lane Keeping System (ALKS)", and obtained the qualification to legally hit the road on the German highway.
So far, the century-old car brand Mercedes-Benz and Germany, which has a century-old automobile industry foundation, have joined forces to break the inherent impression of consumers on traditional car companies and traditional automobile industries, and opened the prelude to a new era of L3-level autonomous vehicles, which shows that the German government is not ambiguous in promoting the development of autonomous driving technology.
Before NHTSA issued new regulations this time, General Motors and its self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise submitted an application to NHTSA to produce and deploy a self-driving car without manual control devices (such as steering wheels, brake pedals, etc.), which shows that with autonomous driving becoming a global consensus, even traditional car companies are catching up with this wave.
However, from the perspective of the direction of this policy adjustment, Tesla, which is extremely aggressive in the promotion of automatic driving, is undoubtedly the most profitable. In the past few years, Tesla has not only subverted consumers' perception of new energy vehicles, but also has been developing its electric vehicles with "semi-automatic driving capabilities", and its world-famous FSD has been tested in many versions for many years, and has now been popularized around the world and has become the first choice for many car owners.
In January of this year, Tesla released its Vehicle Safety Data Report for the fourth quarter of 2021, which focuses on collecting vehicle data and investigating the incidence of accidents per mile in different conditions under assisted driving. According to the data, in the fourth quarter of 2021, owners using Autopilot had an average of one accident per 4.31 million miles, an increase of 25% year-on-year, while owners who did not use Autopilot but were enabled for active safety had an accident on average every 1.59 million miles, with a 20% year-on-year increase in safety.
In contrast, according to the latest data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there will be an average of 8.9 traffic accidents in the United States in every 4.31 million miles driven, which shows that Tesla's driving safety level is nearly 9 times the us average level with the help of autopilot automatic driving assistance system.
Perhaps because of Tesla's excellent autopilot performance, even Tesla CEO Musk can't help but run out and echo, "Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) project has not had a single crash since its launch a year ago, which proves both the caution of the testers and the safety of the system." ”
Of course, Tesla's FSD is not perfect, and there have been some accidents in the past two years and have even been investigated by the relevant departments in the United States many times, but at this stage, it is still the world's best automatic assisted driving system. It is no exaggeration to say that what has hindered the development of Tesla's self-driving technology in the past few years is not technology, but the requirements of relevant safety policies. This time, as NHTSA officially removes the restrictions on manual driving control systems, Musk, who has been advocating full autopilot before, will definitely let Tesla develop corresponding models immediately.
Good for Apple Cars?
It is worth mentioning that NHTSA issued new regulations this time, making it clear that the requirement to cancel the steering wheel will also benefit Apple cars that have been in difficult production before. Why? Because what Apple has always wanted to do is a fully autonomous car that will subvert the form of the car.
In the past few years, the reason why Apple cars have been difficult to produce, I think the main reason is that Apple wants to copy Apple's mobile phones and launch a car that subverts the market. Although the car has been developed for more than 100 years, in terms of basic form, whether it is the traditional car inventor Mercedes-Benz or the new car-making force Tesla, Weilai or even Xiaomi Automobile, the new products they are currently launching are still not out of the category of "car".
At present, most car companies are only making changes to achieve higher intelligence on the basis of existing electric vehicles, so that cars can achieve "intelligent interaction, automatic driving, remote control" and other operations, and there is no concept of subversion. For Apple, becoming a Tesla 2.0 is not what it wants, all it has to do is to build a car that subverts the era like it did when it replaced Nokia.
In fact, although Apple has not released a new car since its founding in 2014, it has been making a lot of technical reserves to subvert the car form. It is understood that since 2017, Apple has applied for nearly 100 car patents, which cover all aspects of automotive vehicles such as automatic driving, electric vehicles, in-car software, body, and safety assurance. In 2018, for example, Apple released a report titled "A Decade of Patents: Apple Demonstrates Incredible VR Experience Systems for the Next Generation of Self-Driving Cars." In the report, Apple applied for VR-related patents such as "enhanced virtual display technology", "immersive virtual display technology", "enhanced virtual instrument technology" and so on.
According to the information published in the above patents, with the blessing of VR technology, in addition to working, reading, and even remote meetings while driving, people can also reduce motion sickness by adjusting the virtual environment.
In addition to these patents, Apple has also set its sights on seat belts in order to expand the use of seat belts. In Apple's vision, users can define different function buttons on the seat belt, adjust the volume of the vehicle by clicking and sliding, answering calls and even asking about Siri and other functions. At the same time, vibrations like lane shift problems can be transmitted to the user's chest through seat belts to improve driving safety.
Similar patents, Apple has quite a few. It can be seen that although the car has not yet been launched, Apple has made sufficient preparations for subverting the car, and judging from the patents it has applied for, these technologies are also full of imagination. However, in the past, due to relevant safety regulations, the subversive Apple car could not be mass-produced, which is the reason why apple car projects have stagnated in recent years.
With NHTSA's relaxation of restrictions and the introduction of regulations to cancel the steering wheel, Apple Motors, which has been in difficult production for a long time, has finally waited for policy relaxation. Once NHTSA's detailed guidelines on autonomous driving are issued, the development of Apple cars will be unrestricted and will explode. This time, apple cars are really not far away.
When will China keep up?
As Germany and the United States have relaxed the restrictions on autonomous driving, I believe many people will have a question, that is, when will China keep up.
Although the Chinese market's policy on autonomous driving has always been relatively strict, in the exploration of autonomous driving technology, China is the most radical. At present, Robotaxi test vehicles with L4 level self-driving capabilities abound in China, and some Robotaxi test vehicles have even been able to achieve driverless driving. It is no exaggeration to say that in addition to Tesla, the best test field for self-driving has always been in China.
However, this state of affairs will be quickly reversed as Germany and the United States loosen the restrictions on autonomous driving. Due to the limitations of China's autonomous driving policy, most of today's fully autonomous driving technology needs to be tested on a fixed route, not to mention the direct elimination of manually controlled driving systems.
This has also led to China's autonomous driving technology testing for a long time limited to policy requirements, has been in a state of involution, unable to find a new business model. If China does not keep up with Germany and the United States, This advantage of China will be wiped out, which is not alarmist.
Of course, China's national conditions are different, And China's complex traffic road conditions cannot be casually liberalized like Germany and the United States, which is also the fundamental reason why many car companies in the mainland try to bypass policy restrictions through the RoboTaxi test to explore L4 or above autonomous driving technology.
Of course, I believe that with the outbreak of new energy vehicles in China, China has the opportunity to "overtake in the corner" in the field of new energy vehicles, and the liberalization of policies related to automatic driving technology will not wait too long, and it will be the most suitable policy for the national conditions of the mainland. By then, Chinese companies that have accumulated a lot of autonomous driving technology will surely develop explosively.