Holden: Aussie road signs a big hurdle for autonomous cars

Road signs, or the lack of continuity surrounding them, are set to present a major impediment for the self-driving car's mainstream aspirations in Australia.

So says Kate Cousins, Holden’s lead technical specialist engineer, who has given a glimpse into the lion brand’s role as a global autonomous engineering facility in a recent interview.

Speaking with iMove, a consortium of industry, government and research partners, Cousins says Australia will be subject to a delayed take-up of autonomous tech if it cannot harmonise signs and road rules nationally.

"If we want autonomous vehicles here in the near future, we need to fix our rules, regulations, signs, and basic infrastructure, and make it consistent across Australia," she said.

"The last 18 months, something that I’ve been working on is a traffic sign recognition system that we’ve just brought out in the new Holden Acadia. I’ve driven across all of Australia and New Zealand, every state except for Tasmania, and making sure that we can capture all the street signs that we’ve got in Australia.

"What we found is that we are very inconsistent in Australia.

"Every state has a different school zone and sometimes more than one school zone type within the state. Different times, different fonts, different shapes, different size of signs, different placements, different rules. So it’s been an interesting exploration."

Cousins had input into a national inquiry on the issue commissioned by the Federal Government last year.

If recommendations put to the inquiry by Cousins and others are embraced, she believes autonomous cars will soon play a big part in daily lives of Australians.

However, the 13-year Holden veteran makes a clear distinction over where self-driving technology will be relevant, and for that matter, desired.

"I think you have to put [autonomous vehicles] in two buckets. There’s level four or five in a ride sharing type of environment, and then there’s obviously level four and level five in which there’s personal ownership," she explains.

"I think that second scenario is a long way away. I think the technology that we’ve got in cars is too expensive for the public to purchase at the moment.

"I think where it’s going to be in the nearer future is with ride-sharing type applications. And I think they’re probably closer than everyone thinks they are.

"But certainly in our lifetime, we love driving, we’re a driving culture, we have that. It’s going to take a while for people to not want to have that bit of their own they can drive in peace, and not have to share with anybody else, or borrow anybody else’s car, or rent a car.

"I think ownership is going to be a long way in the future."

Cousins is helping spearhead a new focus on electric vehicles and autonomous cars at Holden, following a $28 million commitment from parent company General Motors last year.

Although Holden stopped producing vehicles in Australia in 2016, it retained a technical workforce of about 350 staff including a design team, global powertrain calibration team and local chassis tuning team.

Last year, the car-maker announced a further 150 new recruits to Holden Engineering – a mixture of both experienced and graduate engineers – who will be fully integrated into global GM teams to develop future mobility technologies.