The quest for driverless cars began during the 1970s, however, it never turned into reality until the development of high processing power, cloud computing, GPS and Artificial intelligence. While fully autonomous vehicles are still not out in the market yet, Auto giant BMW claims that their futuristic autonomous ‘i-Next car’ will hit the showrooms within four years.
Toyota also revealed a new self-driving concept car with an AI companion named ‘Yui’. It will not only know your driving habits and the roads traveled so far but also tells your emotional experience during the ride.
It will act as your co-pilot, a travel guide, and spa attendant (the driver’s seat actually gives a back massage) according to Darrell Etherington at Techcrunch. This gives a glimpse of the future of AI companion though as per Toyota, self-driving is still a long way off.
And these are not the only players, companies like Tesla, Google, Mercedes-Benz, and Ford are investing billions of dollars in building semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicles.
The front-runner in autonomous cars, Google’s Waymo announced recently that company’s autonomous cars have driven 3 million miles on public roads, in which 1 million miles are achieved in just 7 months. Seems like driverless cars are not a distant dream anymore.
According to Tractica, AI hardware, software, and services revenue in the automotive industry will rise from $404 million in 2016 to $14.0 billion by 2025.