I’ve owned or driven five BMWs in my lifetime. The sixth one drove me.
BMW kindly gave me the opportunity to pilot one of its prototype self-driving cars last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. And the experience wasn’t one of dawdling around a parking lot, cleverly avoiding a few traffic cones.
Driving 60 mph, I commanded a powerful 5 Series, modified, but generally a production-level sedan. I allowed it to drive me for 11 miles along a congested, rush-hour interstate through the center of glittering sin city.
I had my hands off the wheel the entire time, and I didn’t touch the brakes or accelerator. The poised vehicle automatically slowed only once as traffic snarled in the vicinity of the Tropicana exit.
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I was able to conversationally talk and look at my travel buddies (a technical BMW lab guy, who had his finger hovering around a manual take-over button, and the user interface developer seated in the back).
How did I feel? Nervous for the first five miles, and then, as my confidence in the stable beast grew, I slid into the groove. So much so that when I was driving back to Los Angeles a couple of days later in my own vehicle, I felt like reading a book on that lonely drive.
The BMW self-driving prototype system that I tried, which the auto maker calls “highly automated” and not “autonomous” depends on a pilot car, a 7 Series in my case, that led the vehicle I was in. That pilot car carried mapping and sensors that replicate the effects of a smart highway—unavailable in Las Vegas. Those kinds of sensors provide data, which the automated car uses to discover what’s going on around it.
The difference between automated cars and autonomous cars
The difference between “highly automated” and “autonomous,” my experts explained, is that with “highly automated,” one needs to be ready to take over control of the car if necessary. It includes hands-, feet- and eyes-free driving, though. And in my demo, I was able to perform all three, at the same time, over two 11-mile stints.
In addition to the dashboard (pictured above), a head-unit delivered tourist texts, allowing me to read about the wonders of places, such as casinos, I passed. (Reading is provided as an example of how you can spend your time in a car when not driving.) The vehicle also featured gesture-based interaction with the head unit. You could swipe away text with a hand-only gesture, for example.
A fighter-jet-style, on-windscreen display provided turn-by-turn directions for the manual parts of the trip. Otherwise, the car looks just like any other 2017 Beemer.
Exiting and turning the car around manually in a dowdy strip mall at the wrong end of town, as my first stint concluded and I headed back to the show, I re-entered the thruway with old-school techniques (feet and hands).
Then flooring the accelerator, I crossed into the number one fast lane and triggered “automated” again, using a button located on the steering wheel.
Now accustomed, I removed my hands from the wheel and lifted my foot off the accelerator again, and the machine propelled me back along the same route, my eyes free to wander around the casino-cluttered, mountain-studded skyline.
It looked like snow would be falling, way in the distance on the high peaks off my left shoulder, I deduced, ignoring the traffic-loaded road a few feet ahead of me as I shot along the blacktop.