30 years ago there were already autonomous cars, but they needed 90,000 magnets just to demonstrate

In the last decade, large automobile manufacturers and technology companies have taken important steps in autonomous driving for private transport. At the moment, these are reflected above all in the rise of robotaxis companies in the US such as Waymo, Cruise, or Motional (although they still have a lot to do) or in systems such as Drive Pilot.

But the idea of autonomous cars is not new: its origins date back to the late 1950s with the Pontiac Firebird II concept and, thanks to minds like Ernst Dickmanns (an engineer who was already working on artificial intelligence in the 1980s), has not stopped evolving.

Proof of this is that the first autonomous cars used magnets and low-definition cameras to guide themselves.

The first autonomous driving tests in the US were a matter of state

In the 1990s, the US government made a significant investment in infrastructure to test the technology that helped pave the way for the driving aids that are fitted to cars today and, incidentally, lay the foundations for autonomous driving. with the aim of increasing safety and reducing traffic on the roads.

Specifically, in 1991 the US Congress passed an “Intermodal Transportation Efficiency Act,” a $155 billion initiative that funded highways, transportation safety, and public transportation until 1997.

Part of this regulation required the Department of Transport to "develop a prototype automated highway and vehicle" so that "the first fully automated highway would be in operation by the end of 1997", in order to solve the serious problem of traffic congestion, says the text.

Thus, in 1994 the NAHS (National Automated Highway System Consortium) was established to help undertake this task. This Consortium consisted of nine entities: Bechtel, the California Department of Transportation, Carnegie Mellon, General Motors (including its affiliates Delco Electronics and Hughes Electronics), Lockheed Martin, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and the University of Berkeley. The test bench chosen for the project was California.

Over the next three years, the NAHSC worked to build a demonstration prototype of an automated highway system that would allow "hands-free and footless driving." For this, a lane of just over 12.2 km (7.6 miles) was built on the I-15 highway in California, in which cars would be segregated from normal traffic.

Multiple types of vehicles and technologies would need to be supported, so several companies and universities wanted to test different types of vehicles and systems.

Among them, the Ohio State University Center for Intelligent Transportation Research (CITR) tested two Honda Accords equipped with laser rangefinders, optical cameras, and radars that would center the vehicle in the lane using reflective strips pre-placed on the asphalt.

Magnets and low-definition cameras: the prelude to current ADAS

For its part, a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley partnered with General Motors, Delco, and Hughes to equip eight Buick LeSabre with a unique sensor platform.

Instead of cameras and lasers, these had radars to measure distance and magnetometers. But for these magnetometers to help the car know exactly where it was and where it was going, 92,778 guide magnets had previously been inserted under the pavement of the stretch of road set aside for testing.

Toyota also participated in the tests, with a vehicle equipped with a combination of magnetic sensors, onboard road mapping (to store the known geometry of the roads), and optical sensors to guide the vehicle. They also equipped the car with warnings for lane departure, blind spots, and obstacles.

That technology would become the basis for "Toyota Intelligent Transportation Systems" (ITS), which debuted nearly two decades later. In the test of all these technologies, which was finally carried out in August 1997, a total of more than 20 vehicles participated, all of which functioned perfectly despite the rudimentary technology.

Back then, cars were just getting new features like child seats, smart keys, or the first hybrid powertrains. To think that vehicles could drive themselves on a small stretch of highway using such rudimentary technologies is truly amazing.

Interestingly, those areas are still centers of autonomous vehicle development, although autonomous driving technology has changed quite a bit with the introduction of LiDAR and high-definition radar. Some manufacturers remain committed to using only the cameras to develop their autonomous driving systems, while others equip their vehicles with LiDAR as standard equipment for the future.