Car that can drive themselves

Cars That Drive Themselves…

People seem to like this idea. It makes my flesh crawl.

Well, maybe not that extreme. But the idea does depress me.

A big part of what makes driving enjoyable is the freedom and control it gives you, the individual. It is your car and you are in charge of directing its course, of deciding how to get there. You can choose your route and proceed at whatever speed seems reasonable to you. If you like, you can stop for a cup of coffee. Or to admire a scenic view.

You control your destiny. You are a driver.

If cars drive themselves, then you become a passenger. A passive pound of flesh transported by the intelligence of and under the direction of someone (or some thing) else. You get there when someone else decides you get there. You travel at the speed someone else (or a machine) determines to be the “right” or “safe” speed. There will be no stopping along the way; no taking the scenic route just because.

The only difference between an automated car and taking the bus is that you don’t have some stranger sitting beside you coughing his flu all over your face.

But the essential thing is identical. You have surrendered your autonomy; for the duration of the trip, your fate is out of your control. You are now a member of the Mass. One of Many, another sardine to be fileted and packaged and sent on its way.

How is this appealing?

Oh, I know. It is more efficient. Automated cars can be slotted in tightly, perhaps just inches away from one another – and moved in synchronicity at high speeds, getting us there sooner and faster. More people can be moved more rapidly from A to B.

There will be fewer accidents. More predictability.

And much less joy.

Psychologists (and common sense) tell us that an important part of being human – or at least, an essential part of the human experience – is the exercise of personal mastery over external circumstances. To be able to do what you wish, according to your own lights. To enjoy the satisfaction that comes with learning a skill and exercising that skill. Of being competent.

If you like to drive, you will understand what I mean.

There’s the early thrill of being permitted to climb behind the wheel of a car for the very first time; of learning to shift and work a clutch. For many, this is a big step on the road from teenagerdom to adulthood. It is one of the first “grown-up” things many of us get to do during our adolescence.

Once the basics are down pat, we begin to acquire skills. We get better and better at timing our merges; of learning to judge in our heads just how much room we’ve got to pull into traffic – and how much speed we’ll need to do it properly.

A smartly executed fast pass or perfectly timed corner exit is a form of art in motion.

Knowing you are a good driver – that you can handle it – is immensely satisfying.

Automated cars would take that all away. In effect, we’d be reduced to the state we were in as young children – when our parents buckled us in and took us for a drive when and how they wished. Our role was to sit quietly and await our arrival – more or less shut down in the meanwhile.

That’s the Brave New World in store for us – perhaps just a few short years down the road. The gadgeteers are hard at work. Google – a new Dark Empire if ever there was such – has been field-testing driverless cars for months, apparently.

Probably many people will welcome it.

They’re already half-dead anyhow – sleepwalking through life with reel-loop videos of last night’s game (another passive, life-through-others “activity’) and a vague hunger for another fast-food meal rolling through their minds as they slog back home to the underwater McMansion from another day being told what to do and how to do it by impersonal others in their cubicles. For them, driverless cars are the logical end point. Why not?

If the day ever comes when I am no longer permitted to operate my car myself, that will be the day I give up on driving – as such will have ceased to be possible anyhow.

Maybe, in tribute to Edmund Ruffin, I will wrap myself in my shop manual and beat myself unconscious with a torque wrench. The New World isn’t something I want to be conscious for anyhow.

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This is one of the best articles I have ever seen. It should be required reading for everyone.

This will never happen. For anything remotely like this to happen the government will have to get involved. And there is no way the government can operate a system like this. They cannot even operate the few mass transit systems that they have now. Amtrak is a mess, every bus system is a mess, and every subway system is a mess. And for those systems they have a monopoly and fixed routes. They all operate at a massive deficit and usually only the very poor or tourists use them.

A road system for every driver will be too complex for the govt to run, not too mention too expensive, hell they don’t have any money now to to anything. Not only that but if you put the responsibility on driving on someone else then they are liable for the results. If there is an accident then it will the be the fault of whoever controls the vehicle. Imagine the massive lawsuits that are going to result any time there is a “failure” of the system and someone is hurt?? The lawyers will have a field day.

I consider cars that drive themselves right along with cars that fly, yeah good idea, worked well for George Jetson, but when are we going to get them? Answer: never. Besides America is going backwards, there is no bright future where well dressed, polite people will be shuffled along on clean government regulated roadways. Bladerunner is more like our future (come to think of it there was automated drivers in Bladerunner-robot Taxi’s!!)

I’m not as optimistic. Current-year cars already have a great deal of semi-autonomous function built in, or at least, they have the capability for such. For example, the Lexus LS can self-park. Also, probably 50 percent of 2011 cars have GPS of some sort (including OnStar), which means those cars could be tracked and communicated with in “real time” – a necessary pre-requisite to the mass application of automated transport.

Then there is the relentless pressure of population and sprawl and traffic congealing to such an extent that travel in and around certain urban/suburban areas is becoming (or has become) so
bad that people would fall on their knees and worship automated transport.

I agree it’s not near-term, but in five or 10 years, we might be a lot closer than you and I would like!

5 of The Best Cars That Can Drive Themselves… Sort of

There is no shortage of hype about driverless cars. And the day that cars (trucks, semis, ambulances, forklifts, etc.) truly drive themselves appears to be an inevitable part of our future. But it will be several years before we climb into the family pod and go over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house without someone at the wheel. Actually, there probably won’t be a wheel. Driverless cars or cars that drive themselves are autonomous vehicles and auto manufacturers have a ways to go before achieving that.

Many brands today have systems that do a good job of detecting motion, measuring distances and controlling braking and acceleration. Some will parallel park your car for you. And there are more “advanced” systems that we’ll discuss here later, that have steering capabilities, but there isn’t any vehicle available today that meets the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) definition of a level 5 autonomous vehicle. That’s right, there are no cars that drive themselves.

How Self is Self Driving?

This might be a good place to provide the short version of the SAE definitions of automation and autonomous.

How Do These Self-Driving Systems Work?

The short answer is sensors and software. Sensors, which are comparatively inexpensive include cameras, infrared detectors, radar, GPS Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) which can pindown the precise location of a moving vehicle to ¼ inch, and LIDAR or Light Detection and Ranging sensors.

The real secret sauce for cars that drive themselves is the software. Imagine the computing power required to manage these massive data streams, collate the information, manage it, secure it, and then analyze it using an algorithm designed to predict the correct action. And then the whole system can fail, at least temporarily, by a concrete road that has been bleached by the sun and had repairs made with black tar.

Lane markings are key to keeping the vehicle on the road. If the lanes can’t be “read” the system doesn’t know where it is on the road.

Top 5 “Self-Driving” Cars Available Today

As mentioned, there are plenty of brands that have automated driver assistance features, but we have limited the list to rides that market their system as semi-autonomous.

Tesla Autopilot

When the YouTube video of an L.A. commuter apparently snoozing behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S cruising down I-10 hit the internet, so did America’s interest in self-driving cars. Tesla was quick to point out that drivers need to be alert and ready to intercede should their Autopilot system fail. That said, four years later Tesla is selling a “full self driving package.”

The new package (which is sold as an upgrade to AutoPilot) can keep a Tesla in the center of a lane, automatically change lanes, and even tackle on and off-ramps on the highway. However, Tesla’s idea of self driving requires that the driver’s hands be on the wheel, ready to intercede, while the system drives the car.

Regular AutoPilot (AP2) has some pretty cool features but also, like all semi-autonomous software, its challenges. AP2 provides Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC) which is a juiced-up adaptive cruise control, Autosteer which keeps you in the center of your lane and can automatically execute lane changes, lane assist, collision avoidance, and speed assist. It’s great on limited-access roads, not so hot on surface streets. Because it can’t read stoplights. Also, if the system detects that the lane has widened, it will attempt to find the center. Unfortunately, right turn lanes and off-ramps are considered widening of a lane and the system steers right.

Tesla’s ultimate goal is to build cars that drive themselves (Level 5) and get into the robotic taxi biz. Currently, they have a nice Level 2 system in Autopilot.

Cadillac Super Cruise

The system that is most frequently compared to Tesla’s Autopilot is Cadillac’s Super Cruise. Available only on the CT-6, Super Cruise is a truly hands-free system. Albeit only on select limited access highways. Super Cruise has the typical sensors eyeballing the area around the vehicle and determining range, and it requires that you remain alert although there is no need to have your hands on the wheel like Autopilot and most other systems.

What it does require, is your eyes be focused on the road. The one sensor that nobody else has, is a camera mounted just above the steering column that tracks your eyes. So long as your eyes (with or without sunglasses) are aimed ahead and not down or to the side, Super Cruise does its thing. Ignore the warnings that go off if your eyes wander (or close) long enough and the system will slow the car to a stop, turn on the flashers, and call OnStar to report a medical emergency.

Cadillac has loaded 130,000 miles of LIDAR maps of limited access highways into its system. You have to be driving on a mapped road for the system to work. But it works pretty well. Lane keeping, curves, speed control, braking, are all smooth and the system is quick to build driver confidence. It won’t automatically change lanes like AutoPilot, you have to signal to activate lane change. It also won’t do off ramps. But in terms of relaxed driving, the Super Cruise has the other systems beat hands down.

Volvo Pilot Assist

The Pilot Assist principally is a merger of lane tracking and adaptive cruise control. Unlike Tesla or Cadillac, the Volvo system requires almost constant input from the driver meaning frequently nudging the wheel. In fact, listed under our Stupid Tricks by Stupid People collection are the multiple hacks to avoid the need to touch the wheel in a Volvo equipped with Pilot Assist. Particularly the ones that involve duck taping a bottle of water to the steering wheel.

Why does Volvo require the hands-on approach? We think it’s because Pilot Assist has a difficult time determining where the center of the lane is. As a result, it has an unnerving habit of weaving between the outboard lane marking to the onboard marking.

It does perform it’s adaptive cruise control function well. It keeps an appropriate distance between the Volvo and the vehicle ahead and does well in gridlock traffic. However, if the car comes to a complete stop in heavy traffic, it occasionally needs a tap on the accelerator to get it going again.

One last comment on the Pilot Assist. Consumer Reports ranked Pilot Assist last among the four systems reviewed here. Their principal concern was Volvo’s decision to simply disengage the system if the driver attention alarms went ignored. Rather than bringing the car to a controlled stop and turning on flashers, the system just disengages requiring immediate driver intervention. That could mean that a car going 70 mph is now being “driven” by someone who just had a heart attack or stroke.

Nissan ProPILOT Assist

Kudos to Nissan for truth in advertising. They’ve made it plain that ProPILOT Assist is not a self-driving system but rather a hands-on driver-assist feature. What it really does is add steering assist to their standard Intelligent Cruise Control. It does an excellent job of keeping you in the center of a lane, controlling speed (you set the max), will maintain distances between vehicles (you pick 1, 2, or 3 car lengths), and automatically brakes and accelerates. Like other systems, it excels in bumper to bumper traffic on freeways.

The system does require hands-on at all times. If you take your hands off and keep them off, you will receive multiple visual and audio warnings, the system will pump the brakes a couple of times, and then it will slow the car to a stop, turn on the flashers, and even set the parking brake. Like some other systems, it can steer around curves but cannot automatically change lanes. It can’t recognize stop signs or stoplights, and it can’t recognize things (tire treads, roadkill, potholes, animals) in the highway.

If your windshield wipers are on (other than intermittent) it can’t see the lane markers and will disengage. If snow has covered the radar sensors in the nose, the system will disengage. It is, as they claim, a driver assist system not a safety or self-driving system.

Audi Traffic Jam

Traffic Jam is actually a piece of Audi’s Drive Assist Package which is full of nifty automated maneuvering features like rim protection and a variety of automated ways to get in and out of tight parking stalls. However, what makes Traffic Jam different is Audi’s claim that it is the first Level 3 system to be made available commercially. And, as best we can tell, Traffic Jam does meet the definition of a Level 3.

The Traffic Jam is designed to operate in one specific situation. As its name suggests, the system will only kick in when you encounter bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic on a freeway. Even then, certain conditions need to be met.

The road you are on has to be a divided highway meaning oncoming traffic is separated by a median or other barrier. The top speed of the traffic jam cannot exceed 37 mph (60 kph). There has to be traffic on both sides of your car, or on one side if you are next to the median or the right edge of the highway. When those conditions are met, you can activate Traffic Jam. The system will “drive” the car controlling speed, braking, and steering (within your lane) without any physical input from you. About the only thing you can’t do when Traffic Jam is on is take a nap.

You have to be available to intervene should the system fail or one of the conditions (speed?) disappears.

So there you have it. There are no true cars that drive themselves, and there probably won’t be any for a number of years. However, if you travel lightly trafficked freeways and roads with limited access. Or if you routinely run into gridlock on your interstate commute, existing systems can take some of the load off. It’s not all the way there, but we’re getting closer to cars that drive themselves.

Cars That Drive Themselves | Guide | Everything You Need to Know About a Car That Drives Itself

The Chauffeur of the Future: A Car That Drives Itself

Not too long ago, one needed to turn on Saturday morning cartoons to find a peaceful, calm commute to work. Usually the main character hopped into the driver’s seat of a vehicle and pulled out the morning paper.

No worries about the commute or traffic. Just a stress-free trip to work.

Why? Because the cartoon’s protagonist, and all the other animated commuters, had cars that could drive themselves.

Seemed like the stuff of science fiction, but now, major car manufacturers can produce cars that drive themselves almost entirely free from a driver’s input.

Don’t get too excited about a car that drives itself for now, though; it still won’t let you read the paper while in the driver’s seat. At least not yet.

We’re living in an in-between era where many of the things that seemed too technologically advanced a decade ago, such as cars that drive themselves, have begun developing before our eyes.

Not fully functional but capable of actually roaming among us, the car that drives itself remains stuck somewhere between now and the future.

A car that drives itself, or a fully autonomous vehicle that can independently function on current roads and highways, does not exist. But it’s on its way. And, some would say, well ahead of schedule.

But as with any new and emerging technology, cars that drive themselves present a few dilemmas:

All fair questions, which we hope to answer with this guide on cars that can drive themselves.

We’ll explore the current state of cars that drive themselves and where the technology needs to go before it’s safe and fully street ready.

Categorizing Cars That Can Drive Themselves

You’re walking down the sidewalk and an empty car rolls by. Seems like a prank from some hidden camera show. But it will one day be witnessed by pedestrians and drivers alike.

Yes, a car that drives itself will roll past you one day. Don’t worry; it’ll know what it’s doing.

While a fully autonomous, or “robot car,” has yet to hit the market, many current vehicles have features which put the car in control over the driver. It’s a car that drives itself, but only sometimes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its own five-level classification of cars that drive themselves, meant to help differentiate what different autonomous vehicles are capable of. They are:

Many of the sensors and cameras which help cars that can drive themselves are also in higher-end luxury vehicles. The companies tout these as safety enhancements that allow a car to intervene when it senses hazardous conditions ahead.

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How Cars That Drive Themselves Work

The most complex part of any cars that drive themselves? Their brains.

As the car drives itself, it’s computing thousands of inputs per second coming from various sensors placed on the car. A car that drives itself must be able to quickly differentiate between a pedestrian, bike, truck, or other car, not to mention the many obstructions which suddenly arise.

Put together, the system, sometimes called SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), creates an accurate picture of the environs as the car drives itself.

To create this picture, a car that drives itself uses rudimentary sensors to determine its position on the road. A broader GPS signal tells it where it is on the planet.

Cars that can drive themselves typically use Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), essentially a rotating laser mounted to the hood of a car like a police siren in a 1970s movie. This device constantly scans conditions as the car that drives itself makes quick adjustments.

A car that drives itself also uses classic radar to gauge the distance between itself and other cars. This, along with gyroscopes, cameras, and accelerometers, give the car’s inboard computer a full 3D image of its surroundings.

Predecessors to the car that drives itself may already be built into your vehicle:

Who Will Manufacture a Car That Drives Itself?

Cars that can drive themselves, and their larger siblings, hit the streets big in 2016, after a car that drives itself reportedly made it across the continental U.S. in 2015.

Everyone’s favorite search engine has been taking a stab at being the first to make an autonomous vehicle. You’ve likely seen photos in which a cute Google car drives itself.

The tech giant has teamed up with recruits from Stanford University. The sight of as Google car that drives itself has become common in the tech-happy parts of California.

The company hopes to create, essentially, a futuristic lounge on wheels. Compact on the outside but sprawling on the inside, a Google car drives itself. Literally — there will be no driver’s seat.

In fact, the Google car drives itself as soon as you hit the “GO” button. You press “STOP” after reaching your destination. Those are the car’s controls, in their entirety.

Other major manufacturers, including Ford, General Motors, Daimler (Mercedes), and nearly every major company you can name are all in a race to build a car that drives itself.

The company has also tested its driverless technology in Toyotas and Lexuses, which have been cruising around California for almost five years.

Mercedes and Audi just recently announced the companies will incorporate Artificial Intelligence into their vehicles, allowing cars to become self-taught drivers. The German car giants aren’t alone.

Not Only Cars That Drive Themselves

It’s not just personal transport, but also public. Bus manufacturers are hoping to insert driverless technology into their vehicles.

The popular ride-sharing app Uber is also testing cars that drive themselves in Pittsburgh. The program may revolutionize the taxi industry once again, eliminating the need for drivers altogether.

Just last year, several tractor-trailers hit the highways while a professional driver simply sat at the wheel, tapping away at a tablet. The manufacturer, Freightliner, says the autonomous technology will help keep drivers rested and, as a result, safer.

The company, as well as another freight truck manufacturer, Volvo, claim tractor-trailers can form a column in highways, which increases efficiency and reduces traffic.

Many futurists and tech lovers believe bulkier vehicles which log many miles more than your average commute will benefit from autonomous technology first; that the nation’s highways will be filled with trucks delivering products and goods themselves.

The car that drives itself will only arrive well after the tractor-trailers and trucks have perfected the technology.

What Are Some Roadblocks Facing Cars That Can Drive Themselves?

A major deterrent to cars that drive themselves is the current patchwork of driver safety laws crossing the country. Many states have outlawed distracted driving — paying attention to something other than the road while at the wheel.

These are most commonly applied as “No texting while driving” laws, though the rules clearly become problematic with a car that drives itself.

Other states, such as New York, have regulations requiring drivers to have at least one hand on the wheel. Does the digital hand of a car that can drive itself count?

A car that drives itself, and its “driver” must follow those laws. For now.

Insurers will also have a hard time with cars that drive themselves. What exactly is the company insuring, and who is at fault when a car that drives itself has an accident?

Cars that can drive themselves also present a new form of automotive safety hazard: vehicles prone to hacking. As the “internet of things” begins forming, many worry hackers will overtake the controls of autonomous objects — include cars that drive themselves.

The worst case scenario includes a large-scale hacking of cars that drive themselves, putting passengers and pedestrians at the mercy of hackers who may not have the best intentions.

Conclusion

Many experts believe a fully operational grid of cars that can drive themselves is decades away — some predict 2030, others even later. You will have to continue driving yourself to work for the time being.

But the future looks bright. As more manufacturers try to perfect cars that drive themselves, the industry will begin establishing safety standards and conventions.

Government regulations will also likely catch up, creating the legal wiggle room necessary to own and operate a car that can drive itself.

Besides, you can already enjoy some of the features of a car that drives itself. Volvo has also been incorporating piecemeal autonomy features in its vehicles for years now, and other manufacturers are catching up.

Also, Tesla’s Model S has a cruise control-like feature called “Autopilot,” which uses various sensors to guide the car down the road.

Press the button and — amazingly — the car drives itself. The feature has had some early hiccups, though, and is still considered a “public beta” requiring more polish.

But as the technology evolves and companies perfect the car that drives itself, some day autonomous vehicles may consistently become safer than cars manned by humans. Should we then ban driving, removing steering wheels and pedals altogether? No more driver’s licenses necessary?

Given the rate with which cars that drive themselves are evolving, we may know the answer to that question sooner than expected.

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First Step to IELTS Practice Test

Reading Practice Test 4

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READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1.

Giant camel fossil found in Arctic

The idea that giant camels once roamed the Arctic along with polar bears and walruses is startling. Yet this is the key implication of research published by scientists working on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Lying deep inside the Arctic Circle, opposite Greenland’s northern coast, Ellesmere is one of the world’s coldest, bleakest spots. However, researchers have also found it was the home of a 3.5 million year old species of camel that later evolved into the creatures that now roam the Sahara and other hot spots. It seems that evolution can still throw up surprises.

However, there is more to the project than merely uncovering the camel’s unexpected evolutionary history. The researchers’ work has also demonstrated the power of a dramatic new technique for investigating the pre-historic past. It is known as collagen fingerprinting, and many researchers believe it could transform our understanding of life on Earth. ‘This is the first time that collagen has been extracted and used to identify a species from such ancient bone fragments’ said Dr Mike Buckley of Manchester University’s Institute of Biotechnology. ‘This unlocks the huge potential of collagen fingerprinting to better identify extinct species’.

Collagen is a protein that forms the connective tissue that holds bones together in an animal’s skeleton, and it was only by analysing scraps of the material, found in the bones on Ellesmere, that scientists were able to identify the remains as those of an ancient camel. Indeed it was not evident at first that the remains were actually fossils. ‘The first time I picked up a piece, I thought that it might be wood’ said expedition leader Dr Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature. ‘It was only back at the field camp that I was able to ascertain that it was not only bone, but also from a fossil mammal larger than anything we had seen so far’.

The Ellesmere Island site is about 1200 kilometres further north than any previous camel find. Fossils unearthed at a location about ten kilometres away from the camel find and from rocks of approximately the same age, reveal that the landscape hosted an open forest inhabited by bears, rabbits, beavers and a pony-sized three-toed horse. The findings indicate that these animals were living, even thriving, at latitudes where few mammals can now exist.

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Rending Passage 2.

Cars that can drive themselves

B The system worked. In 1958, a Chevrolet impala made it round a special course ‘without the driver’s hands on the steering wheel’ but it joined the list of other expensive automated dreams. The first real breakthroughs for self­driving cars took place in the late 1980s, in the £800m Eureka Promethesus Project, led by Ernst Dickmanns of the Bundeswehr University Munich, a pioneer of computer vision. Using just four black and white cameras, Dickmanns’s cars managed two road trips of more than 1,000 kilometres through Europe in 1994 and 1995, driving without human intervention 95% of the time. Automated cars have made huge leaps and bounds in recent years. Starting in 2004, Darpa, the high- tech research wing of the US military, ran a series of competitions for driverless vehicles. The winning team was hired by Google, and for years the technology company ran a fleet of automated cars around the highways of California. So far the cars have clocked up 200,000 miles and have been involved in one minor human-caused accident. Google is not
on its own. Other car manufacturers also have some kind of automated car in the works, with research and testing also going on in the UK and Germany.

C Most driverless cars share the same ‘Velodyne’ laser system on their roofs. 64 spinning lasers provide a constant, 3D view of the environment 40 metres around the car, while radars on the bumpers and a rear-view camera also feed in information. The data is sorted by algorithms that distinguish between cars, pedestrians, plastic bags and cats, and tell the car what to do. Automated cars are programmed to be model drivers: they stop when pedestrians step onto the road; they give way when they should; they stay out of other cars’ blindspots and nudge forward when other cars should be letting them through.

D Across the world, 1.2 million people are killed or injured on the roads each year with human error to blame 90% of the time. ‘It’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars,’ says Eric Schmidt, the executive director of Google. Paul Newman, a robotics engineer at Oxford University, says it is only a matter of time before we hand over the wheel. ‘It’s crazy to imagine that in ten to twenty years we’ll still have to sit behind a wheel, concentrating hard, not falling asleep and not running over people’, he says. Computer-controlled cars offer the benefits of safety, fuel efficiency and speed. Roads full of automated cars, all communicating with one another, will see vehicles going bumper-to- bumper at 70mph, eliminating traffic jams.

G It seems unlikely, at least for the time being, that drivers will hand over their car keys. A lot of people actually like to drive and hate being passengers. More likely we will see a continuation of the gradual automation of cars that have been under way for two decades, during which automatic lane-keeping, cruise control and parking aids have been gratefully taken up. A new Volvo, for example, now maintains safe distances in heavy traffic without human intervention, and Nissan is working on software that anticipates a driver’s next move, adjusting the car ahead of time. Piece by piece, radars, lasers, car to car communication, and the warning of dangers ahead will be added as well, slowly easing the wheel out of our hands.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.

Freerunning

B The discipline of Parkour-sport really is not an accurate way of describing it-was developed in the suburbs of Paris in the 1980s when a group of friends began to use the architectural landscape as their playground and gym. Fun was important for these founders, but for them Parkour was not just a leisure activity, it was a way of life. As in martial arts, Parkour involves mental discipline and self-improvement. It is not concerned solely with the acquisition of physical skills, but also with the improvement of one’s mental and spiritual wellbeing. As one runner comments, ‘It teaches me not to be scared in life, when new situations come to me, I deal with them calmly,like I would do before a new jump.’

F The TV ads involving the early French founders of the discipline drew attention from all over the world. A British documentary showed the founders running over the rooftops of famous London landmarks, which encouraged many to start to practise themselves. Subsequently the French were joined by a group of English traceurs called Urban Freeflow demonstrating the rapid growth of Parkour.

H Media and big business have been attracted to the youthful appeal of the discipline. TY, which has done so much to popularise the activity,demands dramatic, showy visuals, including flips and somersaults. These daring embellishments are known as ‘tricking’, a term which, while it is an accurate description, might also suggest a false approach to the discipline. While the original traceurs might argue that true Parkour should not involve competition, there are forces pushing it in that direction.

I There are participants of course, for whom entertainment and showmanship are the point. Inspired by YouTube clips, young people across Britain are adopting a form of freerunning which includes competing to produce moves which are spectacular. Runners who want to display acrobatics to each other are also more likely to stay in one place, abandoning the physical journey and its random challenges.

J The promoters of Parkour call it ‘the coolest way for young people to get fit and stay healthy’ and ‘a fitness regime designed by young people for young people’ and there are organisations where the words ‘cool’ and ‘young’ spark a great deal of interest. Councils, seeing this growing popularity, have started looking at ways to take the activity into schools or even to create ‘freerun parks’ and major companies, meanwhile,are keen to have their brands associated with the youthfulness of the activity.

Freerunners on the street seem to be particularly sceptical about commercialisation. ‘There are already special Freerunning trainers you can buy’ says a young traceur, who like most, wears a simple T-shirt, baggy tracksuit bottoms and unbranded trainers for the sport. Another neatly summed up the contradiction within the notion of this young, rebellious activity becoming mainstream, 4 I don’t think I would do it if it really took off.’

The history of self-driving cars

Once little more than a Hollywood-esque pipe dream, autonomous cars became a reality in the 2010s thanks largely to the research carried out by tech companies like Google. Although they haven’t merged into the mainstream yet and you can’t buy one as of writing, self-driving prototypes log millions of miles on our nation’s roads annually.

Compressing the history of self-driving cars into fewer than 10 milestones isn’t easy, but we’ve done our best.

The driverless dream begins

It didn’t take long after the birth of the automobile for inventors to start thinking about autonomous vehicles. In 1925, inventor Francis Houdina demonstrated a radio-controlled car, which he drove through the streets of Manhattan without anyone at the steering wheel. According to a period New York Times report, the radio-controlled vehicle was able to start its engine, shift gears, and sound its horn “as if a phantom hand were at the wheel.”

As an amusing aside, Houdina’s name sounded sufficiently like that of the famous escape artist and illusionist Harry Houdini that a lot of people thought this was Houdini’s latest trick. Houdini visited the Houdina Company and got into a physical altercation, during which he broke an electric chandelier.

John McCarthy’s robo-chauffeur

In 1969, John McCarthy — who is celebrated as one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence — described something similar to the modern autonomous vehicle in an essay titled “Computer-Controlled Cars.” McCarthy referred to an “automatic chauffeur” capable of navigating a public road via a “television camera input that uses the same visual input available to the human driver.”

He wrote that users should be able to enter a destination using a keyboard, which would then prompt the car to immediately drive them there. Additional commands would allow users to change the destination, stop at a restroom or restaurant, slow down, or speed up in the case of an emergency. No such vehicle was built, but McCarthy’s essay laid out the mission for other researchers to work toward.

No Hands Across America

In the early 1990s, Carnegie Mellon researcher Dean Pomerleau wrote a Ph.D. thesis describing how neural networks could allow a self-driving vehicle to take in raw images from the road and output steering controls in real time. Pomerleau wasn’t the only researcher working on self-driving cars, but his use of neural nets proved way more efficient than alternative attempts to manually divide images into “road” and “non-road” categories.

In 1995, Pomerleau and fellow researcher Todd Jochem took their Navlab self-driving car system on the road. Their bare-bones autonomous minivan (they had to control speed and braking) traveled 2,797 miles coast-to-coast from Pittsburgh to San Diego in a journey the pair dubbed “No Hands Across America.”

The Grand Challenge is too challenging

The challenge was held in 2004. None of the 15 participants was able to complete the course. The “winning” entry covered less than 8 miles in several hours before catching fire. It was a damaging blow to the goal of building real self-driving cars; after news of the fire made headlines, many assumed full autonomy was impossible to reach.

Parking gets smarter

While autonomous vehicles still looked like science fiction in the 2000s, self-parking systems began to emerge either as standard or optional equipment (and mostly on luxury cars). They demonstrated that sensors were close to being able to deal with relatively challenging real-world conditions, like parallel parking in a tight space.

Toyota’s hybrid Prius offered automatic parallel-parking assistance in 2003, while Lexus soon added a similar system to the LS, its flagship sedan. Ford launched Active Park Assist in 2009, and BMW followed a year later.

Google searches for an answer

Google secretly launched its Self-Driving Car Project in 2009. Known as Waymo in 2020, it was initially led by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the co-inventor of Google Street View. It took a few years for the company to announce its prototypes had collectively driven 300,000 miles under computer control without a single accident, an impressive feat that caught many off-guard.

In 2014, it revealed an autonomous prototype without a steering wheel, a gas pedal, or a brake pedal; it was 100% autonomous. Waymo is widely hailed as the uncontested leader in self-driving technology.

The big car manufacturers dive in

By 2013, car companies including General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW were working on their own self-driving technologies. True autonomy proved more difficult to achieve than many assumed, both from a technical and a legal standpoint, and the technology available to consumers in the 2010s was partially automated at best.

The first autonomous car fatality

Claims that self-driving technology is safer than human drivers were called into question when one of Uber’s Volvo XC90-based prototypes hit and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a street in Arizona. Although she was jaywalking, the crash was deemed entirely avoidable. Police officers concluded Uber’s safety driver (who is supposed to take over in the event of an emergency) was watching Hulu until half a second before the impact.

A.I. comes to self-driving cars

At CES 2018, Nvidia unveiled a new self-driving car chip, called Xavier, that incorporates artificial intelligence. The company then announced that it was partnering with Volkswagen to develop A.I. for future self-driving cars. While not the first effort to imbue autonomous cars with A.I. (Toyota was already researching the concept with MIT and Stanford), the Volkswagen-Nvidia collaboration is the first to connect A.I. to production-ready hardware. It opens up the possibility for self-driving cars to perform better, as well as for new convenience features like digital assistants.

What’s next?

In 2020, most automakers have cooled their self-driving car ambitions and taken a far more realistic approach to developing the technology. There is not a single autonomous car that members of the general public can buy, but some firms think they’re close to cracking the code. Billions of dollars and an enviable monopoly are at stake.

Tesla sells an option package named Full Self-Driving, but its cars aren’t autonomous by any means of measurement; the German government notably asked it to stop using this term. Volkswagen is developing the technology in-house, and it pledged to deploy retro autonomous vans during the 2022 World Cup. And German supplier Bosch joined forces with Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler to put autonomous S-Class-based prototypes on the streets of San Jose. Other partnerships, projects, successes, and failures will undoubtedly emerge in the early 2020s.

Autonomy levels explained

While the terms “self-driving” and “autonomous” are thrown around a lot, not all vehicles have the same capabilities. The SAE autonomy scale is used to determine different levels of autonomous capability. Here’s a breakdown.

Level 0: No automation. The driver controls steering and speed (both acceleration and deceleration) at all times, with no assistance at all. This includes systems that only provide warnings to the driver without taking any action.

Level 1: Limited driver assistance. This includes systems that can control steering and acceleration/deceleration under specific circumstances, but not both at the same time.

Level 2: Driver-assist systems that control both steering and acceleration/deceleration. These systems shift some of the workload away from the human driver, but still require that person to be attentive at all times.

Level 3: Vehicles that can drive themselves in certain situations, such as in dense traffic on divided highways. Human intervention is not needed when autonomous mode is engaged, but the driver must be ready to take over when the vehicle encounters a situation that exceeds its limits.

Level 4: Vehicles that can drive themselves most of the time, but may need a human driver to take over in certain situations.

Level 5: Fully autonomous. Level 5 vehicles can drive themselves at all times, under all circumstances. They have no need for manual controls.