Your car: ‘Take a nap, I've got this...

MEET AUDI’S HEAD OF AUTONOMY WHO’S OUT TO MAKE DRIVING AN OPT-IN ACTIVITY

- ASH WESTERMAN

THE CRYSTAL BALL that provides an insight into the future of autonomous driving is a weird sphere of deeply divisive properties. In fact, it would seem that clarity comes not from the ball itself, but from the eyes of whoever is gazing into it.

Some experts see nothing but a hazy point far into the future where humans are always going to be required behind the wheel. For others, the vision sparkles with complete clarity, where driverless taxis shuttle you seamlessly to your destination, or where you nap in the driver’s seat of your car on the boring, traffic-snarled commute home.

No surprise that Audi’s Head of Advance Development Automated Driving, Miklos Kiss, is very firmly in the latter camp. He’s been a senior figure in this area for nearly a decade, but as he and I settle into an Audi A8 for the three-hour drive from Sydney to Canberra, my first line of questioning gets right back to basics: does the automotive world really need full autonomy? Are customers clamouring for this technology, or is it simply a case of having to pursue it for fear of being left behind?

“No question customers want it,” he says unequivocally. “We see evidence of that each time we have introduced a feature that takes some of the chore away from the driver, like radar cruise or lane-keep assist. Customers keep optioning these features, and our research says they want more. The fact is, a lot of driving – long motorway journeys – is pretty mundane, and customers want to be able to use that time more productively.”

Okay, but how feasible is it really? Plenty of well-placed industry senior heads, like Waymo’s John Krafcik, have publicly said that full autonomy may never happen; that it’s far harder to achieve than everyone originally thought.