By 2023, worldwide net additions of vehicles equipped with hardware that could enable autonomous driving without human supervision will reach 745 705 units, up from 137 129 units in 2018, research and advisory company Gartner has said.

It expects net additions for this year to reach 332 932 units.

This growth will predominantly come from North America, Greater China and Western Europe, as countries in these regions become the first to introduce regulations around autonomous driving technology.

Net additions represent the yearly increase in the number of vehicles equipped with hardware for autonomous driving. They do not represent sales of physical units, but rather demonstrate the net change in vehicles that are autonomous ready.

“There are no advanced autonomous vehicles outside the research and development stage operating on the world’s roads now,” Gartner principal research analyst Jonathan Davenport said in a statement issued on Thursday.

“There are currently vehicles with limited autonomous capabilities, yet they still rely on the supervision of a human driver.

“However, many of these vehicles have hardware, including cameras, radar and, in some cases, light detection and ranging sensors, that could support full autonomy. With an over-the-air software update, these vehicles could begin to operate at higher levels of autonomy, which is why we classify them as autonomous ready.”

While the growth forecast for autonomous-driving-capable vehicles is fast, net additions of autonomous commercial vehicles remain low in absolute terms, compared with equivalent consumer autonomous vehicle sales.

The number of vehicles equipped with hardware that could enable autonomous driving without human supervision in the consumer segment is expected to reach 325 682 in 2020, while the commercial segment will see only 10 590 such vehicles in operation.

Today, there are no countries with active regulations that allow production-ready autonomous vehicles to operate legally, which is a major constraint to their development and use, said Gartner.

“Companies won’t deploy autonomous vehicles until it is clear they can operate legally without human supervision, as the automakers are liable for the vehicle’s actions during autonomous operation,” said Davenport.

“As we see more standardised regulations around the use of autonomous vehicles, production and deployment will rapidly increase, although it may be a number of years before that occurs.”

By 2026, the cost of the sensors required to deliver autonomous driving functionality will be about 25% lower than it will be in 2020.

Even with such a decline, these sensor arrays will still have prohibitively high costs. This means that, through the next decade, advanced autonomous functionality will be available only on premium vehicles and vehicles sold to mobility service fleets, Gartner points out.

Safety Perceptions

Vehicle-human handover safety concerns are a substantial impediment to the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles. Currently, autonomous vehicle perception algorithms are still slightly less capable than human drivers.

“A massive amount of investment has been made into the development of autonomous vehicle perception systems, with more than 50 companies racing to develop a system that is considered safe enough for commercial use,” said Davenport.

Gartner predicts that only by 2025 will these systems demonstrate capabilities that are an order of magnitude better than human drivers.

To accelerate this innovation, technology companies are using simulation software powered by artificial intelligence to understand how vehicles will handle different situations. This enables companies to generate thousands of miles of vehicle test data in hours, which would take weeks to obtain through physical test driving.