Audi developing cars that will think for you

The car of the future won’t just drive for you, it will think for you too, monitoring how and where you drive and picking up on your bad driving habits to make life safer, easier and more efficient.

This is the vision of Audi’s digitalisation engineers who are in the predevelopment stage of its Personal Intelligent Assistant (PIA) concept, a project aimed at automating routine commands for the driver so he or she can focus more readily at the core business of piloting the car.

As part of a showcase into connectivity concepts and development work in Germany this week, Audi is demonstrating how its future vehicles will use data gathered from multiple sources within the car, the internet, traffic signals and a smartphone to create a system that intuitively learns and predicts a driver’s requirements when behind the wheel.

Key to the system is a learning algorithm which helps the PIA to adapt to a driver’s behaviour. The assistant will monitor usage patterns to build up a picture of how the driver uses the car.

It will look at frequently visited locations, who the driver calls the most and when, how the driver uses systems such as heating and ventilation and even driving patterns such as how close the driver gets to the vehicle in front when travelling in traffic.

The Assistant will use that information in combination with data from external sources, such as weather information and traffic status to tailor car functions for the driver before they even think to select them for themselves.

It might recognise the ambient temperature and set the air-conditioning to the driver’s preferred temperature, and on a driver’s typical commute home, the car may suggest navigation route options that vary depending on the time of day, traffic, road works or other driving conditions.

If the driver frequently visits a supermarket or service station on their way home, then the system could suggest it as a way point and if the car senses that traffic is heavy, then it might suggest a call home.

If it knows that a driver tends to travel closer to the car in front and it senses heavy rain, then it might increase the defensive characteristics of the car’s assistance systems.

Driver data will be transmitted to a server in the secure Audi cloud via the car’s embedded mobile SIM and used to create a driver profile. Customers will be able to edit or delete their profile or copy it to a new vehicle.

Once the driver is behind the wheel and their phone is paired with the car, it will be able to identify the individual driver, pull their information from the cloud and adjust its behaviour based on what it has learned.

While development is in the early stages at Audi subsidiary, Audi Electronics Venture GmbH, it is expected that the first elements of the artificial intelligence system could be seen in production vehicles before the end of this decade.