The promise of autonomous vehicles is profound: less traffic, less pollution, fewer deadly accidents, but autonomous vehicles still have a lot to learn, so researchers and engineers are building huge test tracks, like this one in Sweden, to teach autonomous vehicles how to be safe.

They are all about the self-driving vehicles, so we have four test environments, one city, rural road or countryside road, the very flexible open high speed area, and then there are a few searches of highway as well. And those are the typical situations that you want to master. When going towards self-driving, this is unique.

But there’s also the pedestrian problem.

People on the streets can sometimes act more quickly than an autonomous car is able to react to. So testing these days involves people or at least crash test dummies. And this vehicles programming routinely puts in situations with virtual pedestrians that force the car to react quickly, and bit by bit, these automakers say they are solving the problems that are keeping autonomous vehicles off public roads.

We solved three problems. We solved the traffic jam problem. We solved the commute problem and we solved the parking problem. We believe that those three are the pain points for you know normal driving or or customers today.

And solving these problems is opening the way for a world in which all kinds of driving from taxi services to trucking is unmanned.

We will also see, I guess, autonomously driven vehicles, like the Nevada car going the long haul, from the point to point, between the logistic hubs you could say. So that is also a thing we see a great future.

Another safety protocol is insuring humans can take control when necessary. This truck, for instance, is being driven from a station hundreds of miles away from this test track.

In 10 to 15 years, I think we will see a slight increase of things that are connected over the 5G cellular networks. It can be vehicles. It could be persons or vulnerable road users like pedestrians and bicycles. It could also be in the logistic chain. We’re delivering packages, let’s say the last mile to your home or the last mile to delivery point you called. New 5G networks will allow humans to take the wheel when the vehicles run into unusual or tricky obstacles. Consumer forecasts predict there may be as many as 5 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2022.

Kevin Enochs, VOA News. 

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Words in This Story

autonomous – adj. (of a vehicle) that has the technology to drive itself without a person in control

pedestrian – n. a person walking in the street and not travelling in a vehicle

vulnerable – adj. weak and easily hurt physically or emotionally