Autonomous driving. A driver of future mobility

Translated with DeepL

The path to the autonomous vehicle is emerging

As early as 1939, the artist Norman Bel Geddes developed the vision of a city travelled by self-driving cars. In his work for the World's Fair commissioned by General Motors, he dreamed that such a city would be realised by 1960. By then, according to his conceptual sketch, the majority of cars would be driving autonomously. Sixty years after Norman Bel Geddes, futurologist Ray Kurzweil enthused that the majority of cars would be driving autonomously by 2009. Geddes' and Kurzweil's visions have still not materialised in 2022. Nevertheless, it is gradually becoming clear what the path to self-driving cars and the mobility system of the future could look like.

Experts see automated vehicles as the pinnacle of digitalisation, particularly due to their technical complexity. However, autonomous vehicles are not only of interest to the public, but also because mobility is of fundamental importance to modern society and therefore affects everyone. Automated vehicles are thus becoming a hub at which further and more fundamental questions about the future of mobility are also being negotiated. These include technical, legal, political and social issues.

Three workshops, one publication

SATW's engagement with the topic of autonomous mobility began in February 2018 with the founding of the thematic platform of the same name. At that time, the topic was experiencing a discursive upswing, driven by increasing digitalisation and advances in the field of artificial intelligence. At the time, the tone of the discourse was still somewhat more optimistic and it seemed as if self-driving cars were on the verge of being introduced. Four years - and countless hours of work by engineers and scientists from various disciplines and fields later - expectations are no longer quite so high.

In the years since the thematic platform was founded under the leadership of Prof. Wolfgang Kröger, the SATW has organised three workshops with national and international guests on various aspects of this broad topic. Risk and safety aspects took centre stage on two occasions and mobility concepts on one occasion.

Publication "Autonomous driving - a driver of future mobility"