Not Automatically Autonomous

Enormous Progress, No Series Production

When it comes to autonomous vehicles, German automakers are back in the forefront technologically. Alarmed by images of a Google-programmed Toyota Prius in 2012, premium manufacturers launched development programs with budgets in the billions. The technological progress has been enormous over the past ten years, and even complex traffic situations in urban centers are largely expected to be mastered. Legislation is moving quickly as well. Germany was the first country to pass mandatory rules for the use of fully automatic vehicles without a supervising driver on public roads.

There still isn’t a single self-driving vehicle that you can buy right now. Why is that? Only a miscalculation explains this. The full range of technology deployed in a robot car adds tens of thousands of euros to its price. For a personal vehicle, the value for the money is just too little. “For the foreseeable future, we will rather see assistance systems with expanded functions in cars,” said Thorsten Gollewski, who is responsible for autonomous mobility systems at auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen. “At present, a higher level of automation is mainly appealing for trucks and people movers.” The business model is the rationale: In freight transport in developed countries, wages and ancillary costs make up about one-third of the total lifecycle costs. By contrast, the depreciation of the vehicle costs only accounts for about 9 percent. In the end, it is a rational calculation that determines whether autonomous vehicles come into use – and that applies to robo-trucks as well as their colleagues on the shop floor.