MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—On Thursday morning I met with Delphi at its Silicon Valley garage. The automotive component maker has been working hard in the high-tech scene, not just developing speakers and interactive navigation products, but also trying to perfect the complex network of sensors and software that will help auto manufacturers offer smarter cars in just a few years.

To demonstrate its progress in the self-driving car scene, Delphi asked Ars to come down and do a ride-along in its tricked out Audi SQ5—which the company will send on the world’s first autonomous-vehicle cross-country road trip next week. The trip is not a stunning announcement, but an indicator of just how far autonomous vehicles have come. Until just a few years ago, self-driving cars were the purview of science fiction. Even just last year, you could probably count the number of people who had been in a self driving car in a short tally, and automakers were heralding stop-and-go cruise control as the cutting edge of technology that would be coming to a wide range of cars in the next few years. Today, the self-driving technology is being fully realized in many labs, not just Google's, and tomorrow is just over the horizon.

Video: Ars takes a (bumpy) ride in an autonomous vehicle.

Purple mountains majesty taken by robot auto fleets

When I arrived at the company’s understated Mountain View workshop on Thursday, I was sweating a little bit from the unusually warm day, and I felt wilted from the hour and a half I spent in bumper to bumper traffic to get down there. I was ready to let a robot butler do the driving.

At a picnic table in Delphi’s breezy garage, John Absmeier, the director of Delphi’s Silicon Valley Labs, talked to a small group of journalists about the work that went into building the components of the car that was about to hurl our fleshy, delicate bodies down the streets of Mountain View.

Absmeier first started by assuring us that Delphi knows what it’s doing. The company’s been working on active safety systems and vehicle automation since 1999, when it split off from automaker GM. That year, Delphi introduced its first radar-based adaptive cruise control system. “We now have more than 2 million of those on the road,” Absmeier said, “One in four cars in the world have Delphi architecture. We ship more computers than HP and Dell combined.”

During Delphi's cross-country trip, which will depart the Bay Area on March 22, the car will be testing an array of sensors that are considered production grade, almost production grade, and research grade. It will collect 2.3 terabytes of data, which the company can use to improve its automated driving systems in the future. Those sensors include radar systems and LiDAR systems, as well as high-accuracy GPS.

”Sensor fusion is really the crucible” of self-driving cars, Absemeier said. Serge Lambermont, who is the technical director of Automated Driving at Delphi, also noted that the array of sensors can give the car super-human driving capabilities. “Radar, it can see through fog, it can see through snow," Lambermont said. "For very highly complex environments we still use laser scanners."

Although Delphi’s Audi will likely be the first self-driving car to go cross-country, the trip isn’t totally without precedent—the company has driven back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles numerous times, testing its system all the way down I-5. But legislation has been passed in California to permit the testing and driving on autonomous vehicles. How will Delphi get across the country in states where self-driving cars aren’t officially sanctioned?

“We reached out to all the states we’re going to be passing through,” Absmeier told Ars, “just to say, ‘hey fyi, we’re going to be making this journey.’” And, as it turns out, all of the states were okay with Delphi driving through with a robot driving, although some were more enthusiastic than others. Some states advised Delphi that they are required to at least have a hand on the wheel at all times, while others were fine as long as a competent operator sat up front.

Lambermont, who will be one of the passengers during the cross-country trip, said that Delphi had mapped out a couple of different routes across the country and would choose the appropriate one based on weather conditions. Delphi expects the trip to take six days.

















Backseat driving

If you’re a commuter and you've experienced bumper to bumper traffic, you can imagine that relinquishing the wheel during that particular hell of the modern era could be a beautiful thing. I was so ready. I hopped in the backseat of Delphi’s Audi and we went on an 8-mile drive around Mountain View with a “highly-trained” operator who didn’t touch the wheel once.

The drive was exactly what you would want it to be—uneventful. Delphi had set up the car’s infotainment system to deliver video representing what the car was “seeing” through its various sensors, and it noted that any production version of an autonomous car might have a similar but more refined video feed.

Absmeier, who was sitting next to me in the back, involuntarily fidgeted at one point while the car was taking too long to merge. “The car is very conservative and won’t try to be aggressive in certain situations,” he told me, adding that this can lead to a longer-than-normal wait if the lane you want to get into is going too fast. But the driver never had to take over, and Delphi’s system was always able to get the car over to the correct lane in time.

The car will also respond to limited human direction while in automated mode. If your lane becomes woefully stuck and the lanes to the side of you are empty, hitting the blinker will instruct the car to change lanes despite whatever its navigational instructions might indicate.

In fact, for most of the ride I couldn't even tell that no human was driving the car. When we got back to Delphi’s parking lot, the driver flipped the car back into manual mode and found a parking space.

When this system does eventually have all the testing required to become production-grade, Absmeier said it will likely cost somewhere close to what a high-end safety package add-on would cost you in a new car today. The autonomous vehicle system is model-agnostic, so it could potentially go into any type of car where the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is willing to make it available.

There are still some issues to work out before you can rig your beater car with an aftermarket automated system though, and work on those issues is ongoing.

Absmeier explained that one issue is keeping maps updated; how will automated cars have the most up-to-date map information, or be able to solve issues like if a flood takes out one of the two main roads that go to your house, for example? Another issue is cyber security; automated vehicles need to be impervious to hackers while still being able to receive updates from the company maintaining the system. Finally, automated cars need to improve their artificial intelligence; at the moment, cars can’t tell if the person in the car next to it is waving it through or texting and eating at the same time, so the car has to rely on other indicators to size up a helpful or unhelpful situation.

In addition to all this, Delphi's lab-child needs to undergo extensive testing before they start selling to OEMs. "From vibration to salt spray, all the automotive standards have to be cleared," Lambermont said. But once that's complete, you can expect Delphi to play a big part in autonomous vehicle packages sold by automakers, even supporting the system throughout its lifespan. "We help the OEMs [maintain the systems they sell]" Lambermont continued. "This is one of our value propositions."