Despite some of the videos you may see on social media, cars and trucks do not drive themselves and likely won’t for a very long time.
There are important distinctions between the six levels of autonomous driving and “self-driving,” and a lot of people haven’t quite figured that out.
SAE International categorizes autonomous driving in levels 0-5. The higher the number, the less a human has to do behind the wheel. Level 5 is what would be considered self-driving since, in order to meet Level 5 criteria, the system would have to be able to drive in all weather and traffic conditions and couldn’t require human interaction for any reason.
Level 2-enabled systems are just now being widely deployed, but wrapped up in the sexiness of the term “self-driving,” they’re being abused by some users either through sheer ignorance or an over-reliance on not-ready-for-primetime technology.
The systems that enables safe and predicable “self-driving” simply do not yet exist and stretching Level 2 tech to Level 5 performance is both irresponsible and dangerous, because the computer is relying on its human for support – support that in a deadly crash in Florida in 2016 was watching a Harry Potter movie.
“From a [self-driving] perception standpoint, you naturally assume you don’t have to interact with the system, that the system is going to do everything that it needs to do regardless of what’s going on around the surrounding environment,” says Freightliner’s On-Highway Marketing Manager Clint LaPreze. “Whereas with automated driving, we’re automating certain features of that operation.”
Tesla’s AutoPilot system, arguably the most publicized and certainly among the most technologically advanced platforms available, doesn’t currently do anything remarkably different from the Detroit Assurance enabled, Level 2 capable 2020 Freightliner Cascadia. It just has a flashier name that insinuates that it does, and legions of devotees that will swear that it does.
