长安无人驾驶汽车完成2000公里征程

长安无人驾驶汽车完成2000公里征程 LK: Earlier this month, a driverless car by Changan, a Chinese auto company, completed a 2,000km journey from the carmaker’s headquarters in Chongqing to Beijing, marking the longest road test of a self-driving car ever completed in China. Yale, what does it tell [us] about Chinese firms’ capacity to produce self-driving technology? Yale Zhang: Well, that may mean China is leading this technology among the local carmakers, so that should be a [chance to say] congratulations to them, but, however, if you look at all the major foreign carmakers, you name it, everybody can do this, because to have this kind of self-driving car on the highway is not that difficult, actually. The difficult technology is to have urban driving, like Google is actually testing that [kind of] small vehicle, but even Google has had two or three small accidents already in urban areas. The ideal situation in the future will be connected; over the longer term, every car will be connected to the internet, which means we have a small telematic control unit in this car and this car can be online all the time, so you think about every car in the world 20 or 30 years later are connected to the internet and all of the cars are controlled by a mega matrix system, and then by this time, together you have this ITS, Intelligent Transportation System, and then you will reduce the traffic accidents to a minimal level, because all of these cars are handled by a computer, a mega-huge computer in each country, and human beings will be relieved from [the] driving burden, and that will be the ultimate solution for this kind of autonomous driving, but between now and that kind of ideal future, we probably have several decades to go, and there is still this very complicated technology issue, as well as an even more complicated legal issue. If your car is an autonomous driving vehicle, but the other is a human being-handled vehicle, and then there’s bicycles and a lot of e-bikes on the street in China’s urban cities and if there’s a very unfortunate accident, then who’s responsibility is also a legislation issue. Greg, is there some kind of [dialogue] about this in the US? Greg Morrison: The Federal government in the United States has ruled that autonomous driving cars can be treated as a legal driver, but that means that whoever owns that autonomous driving car, or who is controlling it is then liable, so in theory, if a Google-owned vehicle is involved in an accident, then Google, in theory, could be cited or punished if the vehicle is operated improperly or caused an accident or injury. The question is, how do you put a whole company in jail? And the other questions that’s come up in the US is since automotive insurance is required here in almost every state, if there’s an accident, who’s insured? Is Google insured, or is Greg Morrison insured because Greg bought the car or is leasing the car? But I wasn’t driving, I was sitting in the passenger seat just riding along. Those are things that are still being wrestled with. Yale was spot on about that. This is a legal quagmire, this is a legal mess that we’re wading our way through and trying to figure out.