I’ve seen the future and I need it yesterday

It’s close to the ultimate irony – chauffeur almost wipes out motoring journalist on the way to a showcase of autonomous car technologies.

But that’s exactly how my trip to visit Audi in Germany this week began – before I’d even got to Melbourne airport.

For some inexplicable reason, my driver turned onto a roundabout from the wrong side of the road, almost collecting two cars that were headed across the roundabout from the right.

Gathering my thoughts and wondering what on earth was happening, I gasped: “we’re on the wrong side of the roundabout.”

Miraculously, the driver managed to negotiate the busy roundabout to get us back on track, but it was hands-down one of the scariest times I’ve had in a car – and I’ve had hot laps with Luke Youlden….

How did it happen?

The driver knew the route well enough; he’d even told me which way he planned to go. The roads were clearly signposted, and while it was dark, the weather was fine and oncoming cars had their headlights on.

Perhaps it was a momentary lapse that had seen him approach the roundabout like a regular right-hand turn.

In truth, I’ve no idea what it was that caused a professional driver to make such an error but I do know that several motorists and their passengers also dodged a bullet that evening.

Fast-forward 24 hours and I’m in an Audi workshop hearing about its connected car programs and the development work it is undertaking towards the introduction of autonomous vehicles.

Audi is involved in some pretty interesting projects, putting the groundwork in place to enable the safe introduction of cars with their own artificial intelligence

At the core of the activity is work it is undertaking with mapping company HERE, which provides the maps for around 80 per cent of all in-car navigation systems.

Audi, BMW and Daimler joined forces to buy Nokia's HERE mapping business for a cool $4.2 billion in 2015.

HERE is working on the creation of a dynamic HD Live Map which is accurate down to the centimetre. Working on three levels, the first HD map contains a static image of the infrastructure and layout of the environment.

This includes features such as traffic lights, roundabouts, street signs and any other fixed objects like buildings. This is what you’d expect from a conventional navigation solution and is generated by around 200 LiDar-equipped cars that gather data from the roads.

The next level map is called Live Roads and is intended to overlay real-time information on hazards such as construction zones, accidents and road conditions caused by weather – such as floods, fog or ice. The data for such information comes from sensors fitted to participating cars, what Audi and HERE call the 'swarm'.

Once a critical mass of similar pieces of information is provided by participating cars, the map makes changes which are then shared back out to other cars in the area.

The third level is action that future cars will choose to take based on what they have learned from their driver, the information they have been given by the swarm and direct inputs they are sensing from the conditions that they are experiencing.

In a hazardous situation, this might mean the vehicle initiating driver assist technologies such as lane keeping assist, adaptive cruise control or autonomous emergency braking.

Reflecting on my own recent adventure, it’s easy to imagine how these future connected car technologies might have made that scenario very different.

If our car had sensed it was on the wrong side of the road, perhaps picking up a road sign or data from its GPS or other fixed object, it could have sounded an alert or even taken evasive action to correct the lane change.

Simultaneously and to pre-empt a near miss, it could also send a signal to other cars in close proximity to the errant car, warning that it was creating a hazard and alerting them to adjust speed and/or take evasive action accordingly.

Those other cars could then send out their own data, so that following vehicles could also make adjustments – with all these actions taking place in a fraction of a second.

In the event that we had caused an accident that closed the road, information from passing vehicles could be shared immediately with the cloud, updating the traffic jam alerts in following vehicles and rerouting navigation systems well ahead of any jam, ensuring other motorists made it to the airport themselves with minimal delay.

While fully-autonomous cars are still years away from becoming a reality, the technology bedrock being developed by car manufacturers including Audi and HERE is the really interesting story.

An ecosystem working to intervene to reduce the impact of driver error shows real promise for road safety, reduced congestion and a more harmonious driving experience altogether.

Representing the first tangible evidence of all this, Audi's first vehicle-to-infrastructure (car-to-x) services – traffic sign information and hazard information – will be available in the A4, A5 and Q7 from this year.

For this car-tech tragic it’s a very exciting future. But I really could have done with it all yesterday…