Tucked away in the basement of an iconic office tower shaped like four engine cylinders, engineer Werner Huber is telling me about the joy of driving. We’re here at BMW headquarters, in Munich, Germany—capital of Bavaria, and arguably of driving itself. But Huber oversees strategic planning for advanced driver assistance systems, so in a way, his job is to put an end to driving—at least as we know it.
“I think that in 10 to 15 years, it could be another world,” Huber says. He’s not willing to predict exactly what driving will look like then, but he’s certain humans will be doing a lot less of it.
For manypeople, automated cars call to mind those high-tech vehicles with a rotating periscope on top that Google has been driving around California. But Huber and executives at other European automakers say the automated driving revolution is already here: new safety and convenience technologies are beginning to act as “copilots,” automating tedious or difficult driving tasks such as parallel parking.
“Driverless” technology will initially require a driver. And it will creep into everyday use much as airbags did: first as an expensive option in luxury cars, but eventually as a safety feature required by governments. “The evolutionary approach is from comfort systems to safety systems to automatic driving,” says Jürgen Leohold, executive director for research at Volkswagen Group in Wolfsburg, Germany.
