by Davor Andric

When will we see the first driverless (level 5) car and what are the next steps?

The major carmakers such as GM, Daimler, BMW and Audi promising SAE Level 5 autonomous driving by sometime in 2021. Clearly, fully autonomous cars are five to seven years into the future. But based on the multi-billion-dollar investment the automakers have made, we believe it’s possible for the industry to create a future for autonomous driving that’s both safe for consumers and profitable for the industry.

What are a major obstacles in the road to driverless cars? Driver behaviour

The final enemy is the building up of the driving behaviour, which can learn all driving situations on the basis of few data, evolve in real-time and make deterministic proven and reproducible decisions. Currently such AI technology does not exist in production. We address similar problems in my Robots Go Mental company, but we are at the beginning in relation to such complex topic.

Who’s winning the Self-Driving Car Race? The race to build autonomous cars has been on for several years. That is the intermediate run and it’s still in hyperdrive, Googles Waymo leads the run but Daimler leads the following autonomous driving pack.

Is competiveness or cooperation the key to success in this filed?

It’s both, the question is between who, car maker and tier 1 supplier and in what order. Brookings adds that the technology-intensive aspect of autonomous cars has attracted tech companies that believe they have much to offer. However, if the carmakers act correctly and decisively, the tech groups may not maintain that leadership. Carmakers must team with leading computer and data science companies as close partners to catch up. After all, the race for autonomous driving is on because the future of the car industry depends on it.

Which Business model will arise with autonomous cars?

Mobility game changer, as car shearing and mobility services they probably will push out the public traffic in the cities.

Where are potential for development and investments? The car maker, a traffic companies and investors will change his way to make business. An entire new field of case law and automobile insurance will also develop as inevitable accidents and other disputes arise as autonomous cars make their way into the market.
How do ethics figure into this, what are some of the biggest ethical concerns that we can expect in the near term? There is a big hustle around topics such as the self-driving car that needs to decide whether to protect the passenger or the pedestrian.

In the longer term, we will need the ethical rules for the use of AI, now it is too early. The question to protect the passenger or the pedestrian is wrong. For now, public support and safety have to be addressed and solved by the car makers not case by case. The more transparent the better. In the end, safety saves lives.

Can you tell us a little bit about company where you work and what are some key technologies you are developing, and partners you are working with?

Founded in April 2017, through the merger of Computer Science Corporation (CSC) and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), DXC Technology is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company. As the largest independent systems integrator and service provider worldwide, DXC is uniquely positioned to meet client R&D autonomous driving computer science, AI needs.

The DXC Autonomous Driving Platform is the operationalization of autonomous driving through the implementation of state-of-the-art computer science at all stages. Building on deep automotive-sector insight, we speed up the client’s development of tomorrow’s mobility with our engineered product with our partners such MapR, HPE, AT&T, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.

What will you share with audience at AI2FUTURE conference in Zagreb?

I will discuss our thesis about: “Fully autonomous driving: the reality or a fiction, can human driving behaviour be replaced by autonomous driving agent and how?” This talk address these challenges. It points out which technologies can be used. It addresses the intelligent and autonomous decisions in real time and show how a few of these capabilities can look like.

author: Davor Andric, DXC, CTO AI & Analytics North and Central Europe, Robots Go Mental, Founder CTO
An accomplished computer science technologist, a technology leader and a passionate developer of AI & Analytics technology. He leads the R&D for autonomous driving in DXC. Over the last 20 years, Davor has been working in the consulting, software and technology. His expertise is in designing and building scalable platforms for analytics, machine learning and AI, and building products on those platforms. He is great in working with both, people and machines and has obtained several awards for technology excellence as a solution architect.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davorandric/