♪
Um, did you see that?
There is no driver in that delivery truck.
Since October of 2022,
autonomous vehicles to help make some of their
deliveries in Toronto.
It's the first of its kind in Canada,
but we might be seeing a lot more of it in the future.
So let's dig into it.
This is,
[swoosh]
You probably hear a lot about driverless cars these days,
but turns out people have been thinking about them
and imagining them for a pretty long time.
Let's start off in 1939 at the New York World's Fair.
[A reporter speaks unclearly]
..world's fair in all history,
Man:
was
you got to see the fantastic world that we would all
live in 1960.
And the idea was that we would have self-driving cars
by 1960.
♪ [melodic]
That was sort of like a dream.
It was sort of a design effort,
it wasn't like a real engineering project.
[swoosh]
Fast forward to today.
♪ ♪
Autonomous technology is in most of the cars we drive today
A number of cars have like lane departure warnings.
The car can actually-- has sensors that can tell
where it is in the lane and if it starts to like
move out of the lane slowly, it can first give
a little warning.
There's smart cruise controls or advanced cruise controls.
What they do now is they set that at a speed,
but if it senses a car coming too close,
it can again give you usually, usually gives you a warning
and then it will actually break the car
for you if it's approaching a car
in front of you too quickly.
There is also things like rear sensors if you're
backing into something, parallel parking aids
and cameras all over many cars.
So that's the type of stuff that you and I could use
if you were driving today, but what about that truck
in Toronto or any other autonomous vehicles?
How do they drive themselves?
Richard:
Our autonomous trucks make use of a very extensive
sensor suite, ah, So what I'm talking about here
is a number of cameras, radars, lidars, GNSS,
all of these senses help to ensure that the truck
can perceive its surrounding environment.
Isabelle:
and radars and lidars feed into a computer that maps
the surrounding environment and navigates the vehicle
through it.
But how did it go from assisted driving to driverless?
Is it even legal?
[swoosh]
Let's take a little trip around the world to some
autonomous vehicles hotspots.
That Loblaws delivery truck...
they're allowed because Ontario launched a pilot project
in 2016 to test autonomous vehicles
on public roads, and they also received special permission
to go fully driverless.
In Singapore, they built a fake town
to allow autonomous vehicles to be tested.
♪ ♪
And surprise, surprise, Silicon Valley
and San Francisco, both global tech hubs in California,
have led the charge of autonomous vehicles
and driverless ride hailing services.
But one of the biggest hotspots in the world
is actually a hotspot in the middle of a desert.
Phoenix, AZ has been the world leader in the testing
of autonomous vehicles. Why phoenix?
The Governor of Arizona announced, hey, we have no
regulations here, we would love your businesses
to come here. Please.
He didn't say it this way, but basically what he said is
please use the citizens of my state as your
Guinea pigs in this experiment.
That experiment has shed some light on the problems
with autonomous vehicles.
In 2018, an autonomous vehicle struck and killed
a woman there.
And we're not quite ready yet for this technology.
We don't have the technology to work,
that's not robust enough, which is why people are testing
it to see can we build up an understanding of a robust
enough computer systems to be able to make
the decisions that do result in significantly safer cars,
but unfortunately we're not there yet.
♪ ♪
So, I'm actually in the process of learning how to drive
and getting my driver's license.
But this story has me thinking about if I actually need to.
Like maybe I should be brushing up on my power nap
skills to take advantage of all the down time
in a self driving car...
..or making voice activated commands telling my car
where to take me, like hey car, take me to school.
Now that would be a lot easier than all of these
driving lessons and tests.
But for the time being, I'll stick to two hands
on the steering wheel and learning the basics.
That's it for
For
♪ ♪