What car should I buy to maximise autonomous motorway driving?
Patrick Finn
That’s a deceptively simple question, because the answer contains a warning: there are no autonomous cars.
I’m picking at the nits of semantics here, but it is really important to state, not for the first time, that there are no autonomous cars currently on sale in Ireland, or anywhere else.
There are lots of claims for autonomy. There are prototype driverless taxis from the likes of Waymo and Lyft circulating in some cities, but as far as cars you can actually buy go, there is no single car on sale that allows the driver to disengage from the job of driving.
Yes, there are lots of cars that can take over basic steering and speed control, but these are all predicated on the fact that a human driver is still sitting in the seat, holding the steering wheel, and has their eyes firmly on the road.
RM Block
One then has to ask the supplementary question: Is any of this tech actually worth it?
There’s a huge number of cars that come with what is known as Level 2 automation, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).
The definition of Level 2 means that the car can take a lot of the strain, especially on motorways and other large main roads. Adaptive cruise control can, using a combination of radar and cameras, keep you a safe distance from the car in front, while lane-guidance systems can keep you tracking straight and true.
However, you have to be a part of this process. If you’re not paying attention, a Level 2 system will sound a number of warnings to remind you to keep your eyes, hands, and brain on the task. If you continue to pay no attention, the system will either disengage or it may assume you’ve had some sort of medical emergency and bring the car to a safe halt.
I don’t mean to hammer home the point, but it’s important that this whole idea of the “autonomous car” is properly defined, not least because safety organisations in the US and Europe have repeatedly criticised, even officially investigated, car makers for over-stating what their technology can actually do, usually by giving it a grandiose name such as “full self-driving” (which it isn’t).
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Anyway, to get back to giving you an answer rather than a lecture, the best car we’ve tried recently for assisted driving is the BMW iX3.
Built on BMW’s new “Neue Klasse” platform, the iX3 gets a clever, fully-integrated computing system, which means that all of the car’s various functions can talk to one another via four computing cores – rather than a huge number of separate control modules as has been the norm until now.
That gives the iX3 exceptional processing power and speed, and it means that not only will it cruise along the motorway keeping you in lane and at a safe distance, it can even cope with much more challenging roads, swooping and twisting along a steep mountain road at one point with inch-perfect precision, even though what road markings there were, were often in poor and faded conditions.
Mind you, if you’ve bought a brand new 460hp BMW and you’ve asked it to do the driving on a challenging road, then you may have bought the wrong car.
It’s important to remember that even the best of these systems have limitations. Having swept back down from the mountains and hit the motorway again with the iX3, we were cruising happily along using the assistance systems when we came across a complicated junction, where several lanes were converging and mixing.
The traffic in front of us tightened into a knot, and as other (human-controlled) cars began to move erratically around further ahead, I snatched back control from the computer as the BMW seemed to be ploughing ahead, unconcerned, at 120km/h.
That is perhaps the biggest limitation of these systems – they only really watch the car directly in front of you. As any good driver knows, as speeds rise, you have to look further and further ahead, and not just be focused on what’s directly in front. It may be some time before computerised control systems can do that.
All that considered, the BMW iX3 still has truly impressive driver assistance systems, so if you’re looking for a new car to help take some of the strain out of longer journeys, it’s the one to go for.
