Moving Closer to a Fully Autonomous Car -Recent Developments

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz around electric cars. Tech companies are looking to make a mark in this booming industry, including Google, Tesla, Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and even Apple. Business Insider reports that there will be more than 10 million self-driving vehicles on roads by 2020. There have been many recent developments in this industry as tech rivals plan to take the bigger slice of the market.

However, first things first, self-driving cars are divided into two categories – fully-autonomous and semi-autonomous. A fully-autonomous vehicle is capable of making every decision without human intervention. A semi-autonomous vehicle has some capabilities of autonomous vehicles, however, they are not fully-autonomous. Features like complex parking routines have yet to be implemented in semi-autonomous vehicles.

Here are some recent developments in the industry:

-         -  Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors announced a new ‘Summon’ feature in its Model S car that allows a Tesla car to intelligently park and exit itself in places where it is hard to open the doors. He also estimates that, by 2018, a user will be able to ‘summon’ a car across the country.

“Ultimately you’ll be able to summon your car anywhere. Your car can get to you. I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is, and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey,” says Musk.

-        -  Ford has invested $4 Billion to launch 13 fully-electric vehicles by 2020. It is also in the process of coming up with research vehicles which will drive themselves completely without human assistance.

-        -  At CES 2016, Faraday Future (750+ employees) has unveiled their FFZERO1 concept car (looks like a spaceship + batmobile) that has four electric motors with 1000HP.

-         -  Ford is testing self-driving cars in snowy environments. Recently, Ford posted a YouTube video showing a test at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

-          - Recently, Apple and Facebook both registered the .car domain name in the company’s name.

-          - West Virginia has joined Connecticut, Utah, Texas and Michigan in banning direct sales of Tesla cars (without going through car dealers).

-          - In a recent BBC interview, when reporters asked Elon Musk about the development of Apple’s self-driving car, he responded: "Well, it's pretty hard to hide something if you hire over a thousand engineers to do it. This is an open secret."

Recently, Musk was criticized for making the following statement, which he later retracted:

"If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk said, commenting on how Apple is poaching employees for automotive companies like Tesla, GM, Ford, Chrysler and Volkswagen, among others. 

Apple’s self-driving car project, known as “Project Titan”, is being kept closely under wraps.