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Drivers could be putting some distance between their hands and their steering wheels in the coming years.
That’s according to Telemetry’s Assisted and Automated Driving Forecast, which looked at the current state of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles and where the tech seems to be headed over the next decade.
The upshot? Over half of new cars will have hands-free driving capabilities by 2028.
“Customers really love these hands-free systems, especially on longer drives,” Sam Abuelsamid, Telemetry’s VP of market research and the report’s author, said in a statement. “But, ‘god is in the details,’ and as these become more common, these differences may affect the customer experience and brand loyalty, especially as the worst of these systems may result in preventable injury or worse.”
Status update: Assisted and automated driving systems are classified from Level 0 to Level 5 according to their capabilities, Abuelsamid explained during a webinar hosted by the Automotive Press Association.
Many vehicles on the market today feature basic driver-assist features like adaptive cruise control. Growing most quickly are what the industry refers to as Level 2+ systems, like GM’s Super Cruise and Ford’s BlueCruise, which allow for hands-free driving under certain conditions. Level 3 systems allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. Levels 4 and 5 cover vehicles that don’t require human supervision or intervention.
“We’re seeing a lot of increased capabilities in these systems that are edging closer and closer to full automation,” Abuelsamid said. “But we’re still a ways away from that.”
Telemetry’s forecast indicates that L1 systems are already on the decline. No L5 deployments are expected in the next decade.
L2 systems that require hands-on operation will peak in the next year or two, then start to decline, according to Abuelsamid. Hands-free systems are expected to peak around 2030, while Level 3 systems that allow drivers to take their eyes off the road are expected to dominate the 2030s.
“By the end of the decade, I think we’ll start to see a lot of these,” Abuelsamid said.
No brain required: There are several thousand of what Abuelsamid referred to as “brain-off” vehicles—aka Level 4—from companies like Waymo, Zoox, and Baidu. Aside from robotaxis, some of the major applications for higher levels of automation include middle-mile deliveries, automated shuttles, and long-haul trucking.
As automated driving tech advances, there are open questions around how vehicle automation will be regulated in the US, how automakers will make money off these features, and safety and liability. Abuelsamid noted, for example, that “not all systems are created equally with regard to safety thresholds,” calling out Tesla’s vision-only approach, in particular.
“The problem withrobotaxis is there’s no timeline for when they’re actually going to be profitable. Making money is not as simple as getting rid of human drivers,” Abuelsamid said. “You still have to have depots. You have to take care of these vehicles and maintain these vehicles. Clean them. They are very expensive assets. And the demand is inconsistent during the course of the day.”
Figuring out an effective monetization strategy for ADAS is also a challenge for automakers, he said.
“You might not need something like a hands-free system all the time,” Abuelsamid said. “Having the ability to subscribe part of the year when you actually need the system is convenient, more flexible for consumers. The challenge, of course, is you still have to build the hardware into the vehicle, and so that contributes to the affordability challenge we have with buying vehicles.”