Honda Joins The Race To Market Self-Driving Car By 2020

Honda has announced its entry into the race to bring self-driving cars to our roads by stating its plans to bring an autonomous vehicle to market by 2020, not coincidentally choosing the same year and promise of competing Japanese automakers Toyota and Nissan.

The announcement was made just one week ahead of the Tokyo Motor Show, where auto companies are expected to showcase various aspects of autonomous cars that are predicted by many to be the future of transportation. At this point, Honda has yet to provide details about the capabilities of its self-driving car, beyond the fact that it will be fully automated.

The 2020 Summer Olympics will be hosted in Japan, so it’s therefore not surprising that the country’s three leading automakers are all promising to deliver driverless cars by this time.

Elsewhere, the race to bring increasingly sophisticated semi-autonomous and eventually fully driverless cars to our roads continues to ramp up. Google’s self-driving cars, which began as a Toyota Prius, Lexus RX450h and an Audi TT equipped with Google’s LIDAR system, began road testing in 2012. This prompted traditional automakers to announce their own plans to develop autonomous or semi-autonomous technologies for their vehicles, in an attempt to prevent tech companies from becoming the leaders in this space.

Toyota, as one example, unveiled the Highway Teammate, its prototype for a self-driving car based on the Lexus GS, which took Japanese journalists out for a test ride earlier this month. As the name implies, the car is not completely autonomous yet, as it can only go into full autopilot mode when it enters a highway. Regardless, when the driver pushes the autopilot button next to the steering wheel, the car impressively steers itself on the highway, switches lanes, and overtakes other cars by utilizing map data gathered by one camera, five radar devices and six laser sensors. When the car exits the highway, it detects the change and automatically puts the control of the car back into the hands of the driver.

As another example, electric carmaker Tesla recently rolled out a major software update to its Model S sedans, which are now capable of keeping and changing lanes, speeding up and slowing down, and initiating the brakes as required. Additionally, Version 7.0 of Tesla’s software allows the car to look for a parking space and parallel park itself. Tesla CEO Elon Musk promises that, in the future, the Model S will be able to park itself into a garage without a driver behind the wheel.

The current state of semi-autonomous cars is incredible, with automakers and tech companies developing increasingly innovative features with no signs of slowing down. But when will a fully driverless car be available for commercial purchase and travel? And which company will be the first to deliver this technology to the world?