Back in Episode #748 earlier this year, I covered the five levels of Artificial General Intelligence. Well, today, inspired by my first-ever experience in an autonomous vehicle (a Waymo ride while in San Francisco recently), we’ve got an episode on the five levels of motor-vehicle automation.
These five levels were first devised in 2014 by a standards organization called SAE International. Their classification system was revised most recently in 2021.
The first thing to note about these five levels of automation is that there are actually six levels because there is a Level 0. Level 0 vehicles have no driving automation, meaning that the human driver is always in full control of the car. Until recent years, vehicles at Level 0 were the only kinds of cars out there and the kind of car that I personally learned to drive on. Something to note here is that Level 0 vehicles can still have sensors that provide automated warnings to the driver such as beeping when you veer out of your driving lane or even engage in automated braking.
Level 1 is what we can call the “driver assistance” level. At Level 1, the car can control either speed or steering, but not both at the same time. So, here, you might have lane assist technology that adjusts your steering wheel slightly to keep you in your lane or you might have radar that allows your cruise control to be adaptive and slow down automatically based on how quickly the vehicle is moving in the lane ahead of you. This Level 1 automation is what I enjoy in the car I drive most frequently. On the highway, when I put on cruise control, I may not need to touch the gas or the brake at any point on the highway because the car automatically slows down when it needs to and accelerates up to the level I set the cruise control to when it can.
Unlike Level 1, Level 2 automated cars control both speed and steering at the same time. This is what Tesla’s (marketing-department named) “Fully Self-Driving” (FSD) offers. I’ve also driven a new Ford SUV that had this capability. Vehicles in this Level 2 seem to be more or less fully autonomous under particular conditions, such as while driving on the highway, in a traffic jam or even self-parking. As such, this level is called “partial automation”. As a human driver, I find driving cars at this level a little bit annoying because it seems like you shouldn’t need to do anything in these circumstances, but the driver is required to be alert because you might need to take over at any moment and so my experience is that if you try to let go of the steering wheel for more than a few seconds, the car starts to make lots of annoying warnings and forces you to take back control.
So Levels 0, 1 and 2 require a human to be alert and at least actively monitoring the driving at all times. From Level 3 upward, humans don’t need to be in control at all times. Specifically, Level 3 is known as the “conditional automation” level, meaning that the car can control its speed and steering and monitor its surroundings independently such that it can drive on its own under certain conditions. A human still needs to be sitting in the driver’s seat, but doesn’t need to be holding the wheel and the car will alert the human in the driver’s seat if it needs the human to take over. From videos I’ve seen online, there are certainly some Tesla FSD drivers out there using their Tesla like this. Self-driving taxi companies like Waymo also use their vehicles at this level prior to receiving full clearance from authorities: There’s a driver in the seat when the car picks you up, but they don’t seem to do anything on most trips.
Level 4 is where things start to get really interesting and this is the state of the art in the real world today. A Level 4-automated car does not require a human driver in the driver’s seat; indeed, the car may not even have a steering wheel or pedals. So when I was recently in San Francisco and my Waymo picked me up, the Jaguar did have a steering wheel and pedals, but there was nobody in the front seat and I had a really great and reassuring ride! Level 4 automation then involves complete autonomy, but critically, only under certain conditions. Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, for example, are limited today to driving only in certain neighborhoods and they don’t drive on the highway where collisions are more likely to be serious or fatal. Another example of a Level 4 limitation might be extreme weather. In a scenario like that, the vehicle might pull over and stop rather than require a human driver to take over.
Finally, Level 5 automation — the highest tier — may not be long away now. In this tier, the vehicle is truly fully autonomous: It can drive without a human (perhaps without a steering wheel or pedals) in any kind of driving situation (e.g., highway, New York City, parking garage) and any kind of weather a human could drive in. I’m excited for the flexibility that this level of automation will afford us. We could sleep during a long overnight commute, we could have a front seat that faces the back seat so that we could play games with our friends like we do on a train, and we could have our kids picked up for school or extra-curricular activities safely and at low cost. The future is near and lots of possibilities beckon!
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