CTO Blog: What a Difference a Year Makes
If you have attended the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) during the past few years, you may have seen an Aptiv autonomous car navigating the streets of Las Vegas. You may not have taken much notice, because it looks like a normal car.
That’s right - it looks just like a normal car, thanks to Aptiv’s elegant and skillful integration of the most advanced automated driving platform out there. By producing a system, with our partner Mobileye, that can be integrated into the body of any vehicle, and have it look like a normal car shows that we are closing the gap on producing and commercializing this system.
Last year the car was branded as Delphi, but in December, we changed our name to Aptiv after spinning off our powertrain division.
During CES 2017, Aptiv (then Delphi) demonstrated the most complex autonomous drive at that time with partners Mobileye and Intel. It was a 6.3 mile loop that included highway miles, highway merging, city street cross traffic and cross walk intelligence, as well as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) – to name just a few.
Since you can’t see the technology by looking at the car, you won’t be able to tell the improvements from last year. So, here are a few of them.
- Point-to-point navigation around Las Vegas
- A comprehensive localization solution that provides centimeter-level localization in dense urban areas
- Automatic route selection (left/right turns, U-turns, lane changes) based on shortest ETA
- Improved ability to make lane changes in dense traffic
- More human like lateral (steering) and longitudinal (brake/throttle) control
In addition, we have partnered with Lyft to bring this experience to consumers. Our autonomous driving platform will be deployed within Lyft’s ride-hailing ecosystem. Aptiv will provide the ride and Lyft will provide the app. It will deliver a seamless experience for the lucky passengers able to catch a ride in Aptiv’s self-driving car.
This is shaping to be an epic CES – hope to see you in Vegas.
