Germany gets autonomous driving law

German car-makers finally have a framework to develop and produce self-driving cars after the country’s parliament approved new autonomous-driving laws last week.

After years of pleading from car-makers, which insisted their self-driving technology far outstripped German law, the country’s upper house of Parliament finally defined how autonomous cars could use German roads.

But the rules won’t please everyone, because they effectively place all responsibility for autonomous-car crashes on the manufacturer, which would have seen Tesla culpable for some of its more notorious Auto Pilot crashes, still posted on YouTube.

The law was pushed by Chancellor Angela Merkel and it insists that a driver must not only be at the wheel of cars running in an autonomous mode, but they also need to be prepared to take back control of the car if it’s demanded of them.

All of Germany’s peak premium car-makers, like BMW, Audi, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, Daimler, have already invested heavily in autonomous-driving technologies, which they’ve mainly tested in either Nevada or California in the US, specific pieces of approved autobahns in Germany or at their own private test centres.

Volkswagen is also already a leading player in the development of autonomous cars, while the other German makes, Ford and Opel, lag behind.

The law effectively circumvents the EU’s Vienna Conventions and takes autonomous cars up to Level 3 in the five-step classification for autonomous driving. With Level 3 loosely defined as “hands off” to watch movies, use phones or read books, but prepared to take over in a hurry, at least two German cars will push the limits of the new law already this year.

Both the all-new Audi A8 and the Mercedes-Benz S-Class facelift, due this year, will deliver the technology required for Level 3 autonomy, though Mercedes-Benz had planned to use a time limit for hands-off driving.

The next step would be Level 4 (or “mind off”) driving, which lets the driver decide to completely relinquish control, then Level 5, with no human intervention necessary at all.

The German government came to the conclusion that autonomous driving was, as Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt insisted, “the greatest mobility revolution since the invention of the car”.

The law also demands that car companies fit cars with black boxes to record when the driver was in control and when the car was in control, ostensibly to allow the government to apportion blame in crashes and in traffic offences.

While the driver will be responsible for any crashes, the manufacturer will be responsible for any self-driving crashes where the system has failed or its programmers had overlooked something serious, such as when Tesla’s system couldn’t see a turning truck in Florida in May last year and 40-year-old Joshua Brown was killed.

While the law has not clarified the government position on data protection or collection, it will be readdressed in two years.

As reported this week, South Korea is also supporting the self-driving technology of its own carmakers by developing K-City, a 360,000 square-metre test centre.

Conceived to pull Kia, Hyundai and Genesis towards the forefront of autonomous-vehicle development, K-City is an 11-billion won project from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, even though its car-makers have been allowed to test autonomous cars on South Korean roads since last November.

While BMW, Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen test at a variety of their own test circuits as well as California and Nevada, Daimler has stepped even further, developing its own private test centre for autonomous vehicles.

The Immendingen autonomous-car facility is a 500-hectare section of a larger test centre, into which Daimler has poured more than €200 million and created 300 new jobs to accelerate its autonomous vehicle development for cars, vans and heavy trucks.

A new kind of test centre, it doesn’t have hundreds of kilometres of intertwined roads. Instead, the centrepiece is a huge, open concrete pad, with a range of lanes leading to it so cars, trucks, vans and buses can approach it from different angles, at different speeds.

It doesn’t mean Benz is pulling back into a purely digital world of autonomous development. Far from it, as von Hugo explained.

“We won’t solely rely on that track for autonomous driving. We can’t test just on a closed track how it works on the road. From a technical project it’s what we use for verification.

“In order to validate whether it works in the real world, we have to do testing in the real world with the different problems in the real world.”

While many of the ideas employed at Immendingen are all new, the philosophy is the same. Develop digitally, verify on the test track, and then test in the real world when it’s nearly ready.

But the core of it isn’t as complex as the technical mountain autonomous engineers have to climb. It’s old-school concrete and asphalt.

“For autonomous driving we have a huge concrete place that’s more important.

“It’s not a track but 200 by 300 metres, with lanes to accelerate you in to a free concrete space,’ von Hugo said.

If that seems a world removed from perceptions of the mega high-tech needed for production autonomous and electric cars, there’s a good reason. The core of it is not the technology of the site. It’s the flexibility to replicate problems found virtually and in the real world.

“We need that (the concrete space) to do all kinds of maneuvers. We don’t need that many miles of road for it.

“Rather, certain scenarios, like vehicles merging or cutting in to lanes, automated driving targets and being able to do it over and over again.

“It’s more flexible if there is a thin metal plate on wheels (as the hazard vehicle) that’s radio controlled and with a Styrofoam body on top of it.

“We can change the bodies (on top of the plates) to be people or cars or trucks or vans or bikes. We can change the speed or angles or directions.

“If we want a car to test with 0.6 seconds in front, then this target vehicle can do that over and over again very reliably.”

And autonomous driving will need a lot of simulations and far more validation than any current form of personal mobility.

“There is a lot of simulation needed for autonomous driving. We don’t want to drive every manoeuver, but we want to improve our algorithms so we don’t need to,” von Hugo explained.

“Once we have driven a maneuver multiple times we simulate it again and again and then improve the algorithm to run it back through the same data. Maybe it’s a tenth of a second closer or a km/h faster, but based on the same data.

“We always want to cover more simulations. It can be just software in the loop, but sometimes we want to see how the hardware changes affect it, so we put that in the loop as well.”

“With the virtual phase, it’s not just about the technology and no malfunctions but the people and how they do things and react,” von Hugo admitted.

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