ABSTRACT
Making the car more intelligent-in other words, car robotizationhas taken off in recent years. The development of smart driver assistance systems in cars is currently rapidly progressing. In part, this is caused by the decrease in the price of the required components, such as video cameras, microprocessors, and sensors. Therefore, such systems are no longer just built into expensive car models but are also increasingly fitted in middle-class models. In addition, car manufacturers especially compete with each other in terms of comfort and safety, because there is actually not much more to improve in the quality of cars (Gusikhin, Filev, & Rychtyckyj, 2008). Intelligence, therefore, becomes the unique selling point for a new car, as we can see from the advertising text of the Ford Focus. Future systems will evolve from “driver assistance” to “fully automated (autonomous) driving,” completely piloting a car along highways and through urban environments. Although the idea of driverless cars on the road may seem futuristic, industry leaders anticipate that autonomous cars will hit the road within the next decade. This projection is due to the fact that the majority of the technologies necessary to build a fully autonomous car already exist (Pawsey & Nath, 2013). This vision of the path toward fully autonomous cars assumes that car robotization is a continuum between conventional, fully human-driven vehicles and vehicles that
require no driver at all. Actually, it is an ongoing automation and interconnection of single vehicles and traffic’s infrastructure that aims at fully self-driving or autonomous cars. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2013) developed a five-level hierarchy to conceptualize this continuum as guidance “to help states implement this technology safely so that its full benefits can be realized”:
• Level 0 (no automation): The human driver is in complete control of all functions of the vehicle.
