Continental's self-driving chief sees full autonomy taking time

HANOVER, Germany -- The first fully autonomous vehicles able to handle all conditions on public roads -- and potentially replacing private car ownership, will probably not appear until after 2030, said Continental AG's head of self-driving car projects, Andree Hohm.

"People always ask me when driverless vehicles will be on the road," he said this month at Continent's Tech Show in Hanover, "and I tell them the answer is 'today.' If you have a very specific application area, for example like a private road, and want to travel at low velocity, you can buy such a vehicle."

Early forecasts that driverless mobility would first appear on highways have shifted, he said, with the realization of the difficulties of trying to bring a vehicle traveling at high speeds to a safe stop in case of a malfunction.

Hohm said the consensus feeling at Continental is that low-speed, urban settings will be ground zero for autonomous driving.

Urban situations may be more complex than highways, he said, "but they have one key advantage: Slower speeds give you more opportunities when systems fail or you get erroneous readings from sensors."

Continental is active in many areas of autonomous driving technology. The supplier is working to make parts in series production suitable for use in robotaxis, and is offering some of them in the EZ10 autonomous shuttle from EasyMile, a French company in which it holds a stake. Development work is being done on the Cube platform, which is based on the EZ10.

Continental's autonomous driving systems include the ability to generate a 360-degree image from a combination of data from radar, lidar and cameras to provide redundancy.

"We at Continental consider driverless mobility to be very promising," he said. "It will have a significant share of the mobility of the future."

Continental CEO Elmar Degenhart said in April that the overall software market alone for autonomous vehicles was expected to grow from $314 billion to $1.35 trillion by 2030.

Nonetheless, Hohm said, autonomous vehicle technology has three hurdles to overcome before it becomes viable for widespread use: technology, regulatory approval and consumer acceptance.

The key technology challenge will be combining a variety of sensors inside the vehicle (radar, lidar and cameras) to create a safe environment. "This foundation has to be very solid," he said. "You have to cover all situations because there's no driver as a fallback option."

One of Continental's solutions is to incorporate external sensors on street signs and roadways -- for example, in a "smart intersection" that can detect situations well ahead of the vehicle. Breakdowns, accidents and erratic pedestrians "can be better perceived from the viewpoint of the intersection compared to the viewpoint of an approaching car," he said.

On regulations, the main problem is a lack of a unified framework for testing and implementation of autonomous vehicles, he said. "Lots of pilot projects are pushing forward, but in a very heterogeneous way," he said. "This is a very challenging scenario, because if we're going to invest a lot of money we have to be sure that the solutions we create fit a wide variety of countries."

Finally, he noted, many consumers are skeptical about driverless cars, and studies have found that worries are increasing, at least in Germany in the U.S., although Chinese respondents are become more receptive.

"It still sounds a little bit creepy, if you think about it -- going into a car where there is no one at the steering wheel," he said. "This is for us a clear signal that we have to introduce those functionalities step by step.

"We need to clearly show what we are introducing," Hohm added. "We need to involve people in pilot projects, so they can actually experience how exciting the technology is."