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The Road to Autonomous Driving Transforming Vision into Reality Page 4 TE AUTOMOTIVE /// Trend Paper | The Road to Autonomous Driving 1 | INTRODUCTION: AN INDUSTRY IN TRANSFORMATION Imagine a day in the not-so-distant future … … Your plane lands at the airport in a city you are visiting for the first time. Upon leaving the terminal you decide that you would like to eat dinner before going to your hotel. You tell your smart device to search for a nice, cozy Italian restaurant. In milliseconds, your device offers a few suggestions based on your history and preferences. You choose the first restaurant from the list, and a few moments later a vehicle approaches, slows down, and comes to a stop directly in front of you. The doors open automatically, exposing the vehicle's elegant interior. Four single seats are in the cabin – all of them empty. As you enter the vehicle it politely greets you, the doors slowly close, and the vehicle accelerates to a safe speed. You can now relax as the vehicle takes the highway towards the restaurant downtown – all by itself. This and other similar scenarios illustrate how individual mobility needs might evolve in the near future. The possibilities are inspiring an entire industry. Established tech giants, new start-ups that provide internet and mobility services and apps, and new players in supply-side technologies such as ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and infotainment support are joining the automotive industry to help reshape the mobility landscape. 2 | THE DRIVERS OF VEHICLE AUTONOMY Today's car buyers are already benefiting from advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), adaptive cruise control (ACC), lane departure warning (LDW), traffic sign recognition (TSR), and intelligent high beam assistants with light ranging (HBA), all of which have evolved impressively over the past years. State-of-the-art vehicles offer lane-centering assistants (LCA) fused with intelligent ACC functionality that adapt to speed limits, enabling safe lane changes as well as powering glare-free high beam (GFHB), autonomous emergency braking (AEB), pedestrian detection (PD), and advanced city assistants (ACA). Engineers are continuously developing safety systems for accident avoidance or severity limitation. Globally, governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seek to reduce the number of traffic fatalities and injuries: Autonomous driving is the industry's answer to securing zero fatalities. In the future, self-driving vehicles will be able to accurately evaluate risk and adapt driving appropriately to each situation without experiencing human emotion or fatigue. Self-driving vehicles will react proactively to difficult situations more quickly than human drivers, calculating the lowest risk outcome. Advances in powerful computing systems, coupled with machine learning, will enable self-driving vehicles to provide a safe driving mode. Changing lifestyles also play a key role in autonomous driving. The importance of owning a private car in urban areas, for instance, is already declining. The sharing economy, including car sharing models, is a growing market today. In the future, autonomous driving and mobility-on-demand will be the first choice in urban environments, leading to the emergence of new business models and services. Autonomous vehicles will generate a huge amount of data. Companies will take that data, analyze it, and put that intelligence to work developing new services and features. To date, telematic modules and other units, such as rain sensors, are already used for toll collecting, online traffic services, and weather forecasting. Motion data, personal preferences, and profiles, when combined with data from integrated smart devices, could offer huge value to manufacturers, insurance companies, and the entire automotive ecosystem. The price consumers might pay is personal data, time, and attention. However, many believe the value of safety and convenience will far outweigh these concerns. Simply put, the vision of zero traffic-related fatalities or serious injuries, combined with the opportunities to create new services and business models, is accelerating the arrival of autonomous vehicles.