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" Autonomous driving is no longer a question of if; self-driving cars are coming. But while the technology matures, we&amp;#039;re left with a series of questions: When is it coming? How much will it do? Are we actually ready for it? General Motors, Nissan, and Mercedes-Benz have all promised that some level of self-driving car will be on sale before 2020. And now Toyota is jumping into the ring, with a demonstration of key autonomous systems and a a promise that it will be available by mid-decade. As a show of confidence, Toyota&amp;#039;s demonstration took place not on a closed proving ground, but on a public highway in Tokyo, and we had a chance to ride along to see for ourselves. Toyota is using two key systems. The first is Lane Trace Control (LTC), which reads the white lines of the road with a camera and keeps the car centered in the lane. This in itself is not new, but LTC also uses the camera and GPS map data follow curves, and will even slow the car down to ensure a safe cornering speed. At lower speeds, around 40 miles per hour, the car can navigate corners with a radius as tight as 60 to 70 meters. In Japan, the smallest radius corner on the highway is 100 meters, meaning Toyota&amp;#039;s system can hit every curve the country&amp;#039;s highways throw at it. The second system is vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V), which Toyota refers to as Cooperative-Adaptive Cruise Control (C-ACC). From as far as a quarter mile away, two cars share data about speed, acceleration, and braking. When the leading car slows down, the following car gets that information immediately and can react much faster than a flesh and blood driver would. This results not only in smoother driving (and better fuel economy) but also fewer traffic jams from the accordion effect.  Other automakers are working on the same concepts, of course. The new Mercedes-Benz S-Class even does some of this right now, including curve-following in certain situations. But Toyota&amp;#039;s demonstration worked particularly well, especially considering it was on public roads. This brings us to the &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; question. If you live in Japan, the answer is probably around 2016. For the United States it could be around the same time, but it&amp;#039;s certain that Toyota will be right with other automakers in meeting or beating the 2020 deadline. And because all these systems use existing sensors and technologies, we&amp;#039;ll see other self-driving applications even soon. In 2015, for example, Toyota will introduce a new feature to its collision avoidance system that will not only brake to avoid a pedestrian accident but also steer out of the way to provide a bigger margin of safety. Toyota used a Prius and a Lexus GS450h for this demo, but from the outside you wouldn&amp;#039;t be able to tell these two cars from any other one on a dealer lot. Inside, the Lexus has a center display screen that shows the status of the smart systems. Once we&amp;#039;re on the highway, the driver sets the cruise control and immediately takes his hands off the wheel and sits his feet on the ground. Going around on-ramp corners, with a concrete wall just a few feet away, the Lexus automatically moves the steering wheel and perfectly follows the curve of the road markings. On board the Prius ahead of us, the driver turns on the V2V system (in a production version this information exchange would start automatically), and the display in the Lexus switches to show the speed, acceleration, and braking data of both cars. When the Prius slows, we see it on the screen while our car hits the brakes to keep a consistent distance ahead. Even when exiting the highway, C-ACC can handle the hard braking at the end of an off-ramp.  Through all of this, our driver still has his hands off the wheel, although the Toyota engineers we spoke with admitted that a production version would likely prohibit the driver from relinquishing full control for more than a few seconds. That actually says more about us than about the self-driving technology. When will cars drive themselves? Based on our demonstration with Toyota, it looks like it will happen as soon as we&amp;#039;re willing to hand over control. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9588/toyotas-semi-autonomous-cars-hit-the-real-road-16024804/>