Carmakers have strived for the SAE’s third tier of vehicular autonomy for years, but none had achieved it yet. Not Tesla, not Cadillac and not Audi. Yet out of the blue came Honda with an enhanced version of its Honda Sensing advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) called Honda Sensing Elite, which will become the first commercially available SAE Level 3 system in Honda’s domestic-market Legend sedan.
SAE Level 3 crucially differs from Level 2 in that it’s a graduation from partial automation—like in Tesla’s Autopilot—to conditional automation, which means a car can read its environment and make decisions based on what it sees.
Such freedom is granted under the Honda Sensing Elite’s Traffic Jam Pilot function, which gives the car control over its own brakes, steering and throttle in that eponymous scenario. This lets the car maintain following distance, speed and lane position. It does all this with zero input from the driver, who Honda says can “watch television/DVD on the navigation screen or operate the navigation system to search for a destination address.”
Read the article at The Drive.
