Ich sammele hier mittlerweile gute Infografiken zum Thema Autonomes Fahren. Die sind immer nützlich, wenn man die 5 Stufen einmal erklären muss!
The standard way to talk about autonomous cars, shown in this diagram, is to talk about levels. L1 is the cruise control in your father’s car. L2 adds some sensors, so it will try to slow down if the car in front does, and stay within the lane markings, but you still need to have your hands on or near the wheel. L3 will drive for you but you need to be ready to take over, Level 4 will drive for you in some situations but not others, and Level 5 doesn’t need a human driver ‘ever’ and doesn’t have a steering wheel.
This seems pretty straightforward, until you start thinking about how you might actually deploy this - and about the fact that some places are easier to drive in than others.
As we can already see with the early tests being done with prototype autonomous cars (with their need for a human ‘safety driver’, today these are are effectively L2 or at best L3), autonomy of any kind in one city is different to another - Phoenix is easier than San Francisco, which is easier than Naples or Moscow. This variability applies not just across different cities and countries but also in different parts of each urban landscape: freeways are easier than city centers, which might be easier or harder than suburbs.
It naturally follows that we will have vehicles that will reliably reach a given level of autonomous capability in some (‘easy’) places before they can do it everywhere. These will have huge safety and economic benefits, so we’ll deploy them - we won’t wait and do nothing at all until we have a perfect L5 car that can drive itself around anywhere from Kathmandu to South Boston. And so, if we call a car even L4, we have to say, well, where are we talking about? We might mean ‘most of this country’. But more probably, it will be L4 in one neighborhood, L3 in another and only L2 in a third - and a car might encounter all three of those on one journey. Put your route into the map and it will tell you if today is an L5 day or not.
