But Kia and Ford have both used CES to announce big plans to further their development of self-driving cars.
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Kia plans to have partially autonomous cars on the road by 2020, and launch fully autonomous vehicles by 2030. The Highway Autonomous Driving system allows vehicles to interpret lane markings to stay in their lane, pass other cars or follow a different road without driver input; Urban Autonomous Driving works similarly for negotiating dense city traffic. “The company also shared its goal to “[expand] its collaboration with new companies, particularly in the IT industry and academia”.
With Kia aiming for fully autonomous vehicles by 2030, the automaker will also develop vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications system, which includes vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies.
“The innovations presented at this year’s show demonstrate the future direction we are taking”, said Tae-Won Lim, senior vice president at Hyundai’s Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute. Drive Wise is the heading for Kia’s upcoming range of autonomous driving features that will initially include electronic driver aids but eventually expand to include semi-autonomous systems and eventually full-autonomous systems.
Kia says it is putting $2 billion on the table to fast-track what it is calling a new sub-brand.
Kia will display a new human-machine interface system called “I-Cockpit”. Automatically recognizing individual drivers’ preferences on start-up – based on their fingerprint or smartwatch – the vehicle can immediately change the cabin ambience for the driver with their favourite music, preferred climate control temperature and the type of information displayed by the instrument panel. Meanwhile, the company recently obtained a special license to test its new autonomous vehicle technologies on public roads in Nevada. By 2020 Kia says it will have a partially autnonomous auto on the roads, able to take on motorways and traffic jams by itself.
The automaker will use a Soul EV as a testbed to develop the Drive Wise technologies in the Death Valley area of the Silver State.
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V2X applies a series of sensors, radar, LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging radar) and external cameras, to perceive the surrounding environment and all relevant obstacles, as a human driver does.
