What is the ultimate goal of autonomous driving?

Generally speaking, autonomous driving is divided into five levels, L1 to L5, according to SAE standards. L5 is the ultimate goal, which is to achieve fully automated unmanned driving. Don't think that autonomous driving is far away. At present, many cars actually have L1-level autonomous driving functions, such as adaptive cruise control. The functions of L2 and L2.5 have also been realized and mass-produced.

In recent years, autonomous driving has become very popular, and various articles introducing autonomous driving technology have emerged one after another. However, I am not an expert in analyzing various autonomous driving technologies from a technical perspective. After all, I have little contact with them in my daily life. This time, I don’t want to talk about this topic from a technical perspective. I will talk about what is the ultimate goal of the development of autonomous driving technology purely from my personal perspective? Then we should start with the following questions. (This picture is taken from a great person on Zhihu)

Many people who like the feeling of driving operations may not have much feeling for self-driving vehicles. They think that self-driving cars have no pleasure and cannot experience the longitudinal acceleration of acceleration, overtaking, turning and tilting. Some of them also like manual transmission to feel the surging feeling of the engine roar brought by low gear and high speed.

So let me start with myself. I personally like to drive "fast", which actually means I like to drive at the highest speed limit on the road. But the reality is that even for people like me who work in the suburbs, the average speed of the vehicle is only 35km/h, but it is still much faster than the average speed of 25km/h in the city (taxis run about 12 hours a day, and the total mileage is actually only more than 300km). In fact, many people may be surprised by this data, after all, 35km/h is so slow. But from another perspective, the distance I commute to work is 20km, and it takes about 35 minutes to go to work in the morning. It seems that you think I drive quite fast.

So from here we can see that the biggest problem with traffic now is that the traffic efficiency is too low!

There are many factors that affect traffic efficiency. For example, the magical highway entrance and exit where I go to work every day is a two-lane road formed by three roads at the entrance and a two-lane road formed by two roads at the exit. This has become a daily traffic jam, which I hate.

I personally summarize the three reasons for the low traffic efficiency as follows:

1. The road design is unreasonable, causing vehicles to be forced to change lanes frequently, affecting the vehicles behind.

2. The design of the intersection is unreasonable. The intersection with light traffic has become a traffic light, while the intersection with heavy traffic has become a roundabout.

3. There are two types of snail cars. One is the car owner who will drive in the overtaking lane even if the road ahead is flat. The other is the Buddhist car owner who never exceeds 1500 engine speed in order to avoid being dragged down by the ultra-low fuel consumption advertised in the car friends group.

Of course, the third type is the one that affects the mood the most. The first two are fatal flaws, and no matter how you complain about them for a while, you won’t be able to change anything. But the third type is simply because the driver is not up to standard.

The speed limit on the highway is 120, but I insisted on driving side by side with a large truck at 90;

The first person to arrive at the red light, and the speed at the intersection cannot exceed 20 km/h when the green light comes on;

These strange practices greatly increase traffic pressure at every moment. When you are on the highway, passing a bunch of cars, you may find that nothing is happening in front of you, but the person in front of you must keep a distance of 5km before he feels safe.

A green light takes 20 seconds. The first snail car took 8 seconds from start to pass. Even if the cars behind followed closely, it would be difficult for 5 cars to pass.

The above operations naturally lead to the existence of the "ghost traffic jam" . The speed at which vehicles increase at this node is certain, and any problem in any link of the bottleneck will gradually increase the congestion of this node, thus causing traffic jams. Under normal circumstances, 8 vehicles can pass through an intersection in 20 seconds, but there is always a snail in the vanguard, resulting in only 5 vehicles passing each time. If 8 vehicles are added to the red light intersection each time, then this traffic light intersection will continue to exist as a traffic jam. After you pass this intersection, you will find that there is no accident in front and the intersection is reasonable, but you just waited a long time to pass this intersection.

As mentioned earlier, the consequence of traffic jams is actually reduced traffic efficiency, and reduced traffic efficiency will lead to reduced convenience for people when using cars. Convenience is reflected in two aspects.

One is that when you don’t have a car, the various purchase restrictions implemented by big cities due to traffic congestion raise the threshold for you to buy a car. The two extremes are Shanghai, where you spend the most money to buy the most expensive sheet metal, or Beijing, where you have been drawing lots for more than ten years, with the probability increased several times, but still get nothing.

Second, when you are driving, it is only a short distance of ten kilometers, and it can be reached in ten minutes according to the speed limit of 60km/h, but you are stuck in traffic for an hour, and then the next day you angrily take the subway to go to work.

1. Autonomous driving may help you drive, so that you don’t get too upset when you are stuck in traffic. If that doesn’t work, you can let the car drive itself and play a game of Honor of Kings.

2. Autonomous driving can help those who cannot drive to drive, help those who like to drive at 90km/h on a highway with a speed limit of 120km/h to move to the slow lane, and help those who are reluctant to step on the accelerator when starting to pass the traffic lights faster.

Is this the ultimate goal of autonomous driving?

The answer is not entirely yes. At present, low-level autonomous driving can only help us reduce the physical labor of driving. However, for medium-distance or short-distance driving, this improvement is not attractive enough.

The ultimate goal of autonomous driving is just a means to help us do things. The ultimate goal is to increase traffic efficiency.

If all vehicles can predict other vehicles at the intersection and whether the traffic volume on the corresponding lanes will increase, and all vehicles interact with each other and the traffic lights at the intersection, then the vehicles will follow the most optimized route and travel at the most optimized speed. It is conceivable that traffic efficiency can be greatly improved.

For L5 level autonomous driving, all driving operations are completed by the unmanned driving system. There is no need for a safety driver in the car, and there are no restrictions on road and environmental conditions. In other words, the unmanned driving system can drive the vehicle under any conditions.

At present, the automotive industry and some technology companies have been exploring L5. In the future, L5 autonomous driving business innovation will be more diverse and richer, and the personalization brought by autonomous driving can be closely integrated with shared travel. Vehicles can travel in convoys on the road, and the efficiency of a single lane will increase by 3-4 times. We no longer need traffic lights at intersections, because under the global scheduling algorithm, all vehicles can efficiently pass through the intersection.

If the current average speed of all vehicles is increased from 30km/h to 60km/h, the carrying capacity of urban roads can be doubled. In this way, there will be no restrictions on traffic, no odd-even license plates, and no families will have to buy two cars just to have odd-even license plates, which will increase the pain of parking. Even the constant flow of taxis will be more efficient than driving yourself. In this way, public rental will gradually replace personal purchases, and the problem of insufficient parking spaces will be greatly alleviated. After all, if you sell a car for 24 hours a day, it will be parked for more than 22 hours a day on average.

Beijing citizens no longer have to be confused by the ten-year lottery, and Shanghai citizens no longer have to fight for a license plate at a price of 100,000 yuan.

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