Autonomous Driverless Vehicles in Motorport and Their Contribution to Road Safety

Q: What’s the most dangerous nut in a car?

A: The one behind the wheel. :-)

It’s an old enough joke but, as the saying goes, many a true word is spoken in jest. And even the most cursory check of UK road traffic accident statistics reveals that distraction and other human error (whether that be inexperience, over-confidence, poor judgement, tiredness, red-mist or whatever – see https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/road-accidents-and-safety-statistics) is the primary contributor to road traffic accidents, injury and death on the roads.

The same holds true in US (https://www.templetonsmithee.com/blog/2020/october/10-leading-causes-of-car-accidents/) and worldwide.

The inevitable conclusion then must surely be that road safety can be improved by removing the distracted human from the equation and leaving a computer to do the driving.

I’m not the first person to suggest that, and I certainly won’t be the last, but efforts in this “autonomous vehicle” direction so far have been beset by a myriad of technical and legal challenges. The result is that we’re part way there, but even in situations where the technology allows for the occupant to be sat in the rear, the lawyers go into panic mode and insist that said occupant must sit behind the wheel.

Why? Because the lawyers and legislators don’t trust the technology, even in controlled circumstances (see Audi RS7 later) let alone on public roads, and insist that an occupant must be able to take control and thereby hopefully prevent a costly law suit.

And that’s perhaps fair enough because the technology is barely tested compared with what can happen, with everything from traffic filled rush hour in a city centre, to wet mud on a country lane, being possible hazards in the real world.

The solution to road safety, delivered in a manner that allows lawyers to sleep at night, can I believe be found in motorsport.

Let’s delve into history and by way of example take a quick recap over some innovations, originally designed to gain competitive advantage in 1980s motorsport, that have subsequently filtered down to deliver improved road safety for the masses.

Following an earlier but unsuccessful attempt by Chrysler in 1971, ABS as we now know it was first introduced to the world by Mercedes on their W114 S-Class saloon in 1978. It was flawed though and, while it kept the car stable under heavy braking in low traction conditions, it significantly increased braking distances over those that a skilled driver could achieve without the technology.

In 1984 Mercedes started to use ABS in a more sporting manner on their W201 190E Cosworth, with a demonstration race at the Nürburgring. The limitations of the system still showed though, and it wasn’t until a touring car race at Kyalami in South Africa in 1990 that a properly race-biased ABS system allowed Mercedes to dominate the field with Roland Asch at the wheel. I still remember watching that race, and the 190E 2.5 Evo 2 cars had an obvious advantage over the rest of the field.

This was the point where automotive technology technology exceeded what even some of the world’s best drivers could manage without it.

Specifically they had such an obvious advantage in not just stability but also braking distance, that it could only possibly result in benefit on the road. And that is exactly where Mercedes later moved the system to.

My own experience with cars from that era is that the ABS system fitted to my BMW M5 E34 made a significant contribution to reducing braking distance, better than I could have managed without it, albeit at the cost of often leaving me to fight hard with the controls to maintain stability. While the ABS fitted to my Land Rover Discovery Series 2 did a great job of maintaining stability, but my wet braking distance was significantly improved by removing the fuse to deactivate it, as it would back off braking on all wheels at the slightest hint of even one locking up!

The massive improvements that motorsport necessarily delivered overcame the shortfalls in both those early road-going ABS systems, tested and developed by highly skilled drivers in environments that it would be hard to simulate elsewhere, and I would now seriously struggle to outperform the ABS in my daily-driver Audi S4 B8.5 if I deactivated it. It really is that good.

ABS is now a mandatory fitment on all new road cars, and we have the Mercedes racing team to thank for many of the lives it has saved and will continue to save.

Perhaps a better known story though is that of the Audi Quattro, which made its debut in 1980.

Prior to the remarkable Ur-Quattro as it is now known (a car I like so much that I own two of its direct descendants), 4 wheel drive was something that farmers used in their Land Rovers to help them cross a muddy field to feed their sheep. The idea that it could be fitted in a road car, and used to go faster with greater safety by improving traction in all road conditions, was something that had never really been considered before.

Other manufacturers were forced to hastily follow suit in order to compete on the world rally stage, because showroom sales relied upon it, with the result that most major brands were offering AWD cars before the decade was out. Would manufacturers have made this investment in R&D, or had the opportunity to test it as thoroughly as they did, were it not for the Group B rallying that sadly ended in 1987 with changes in motorsport regulations? They may have one day, but there can be do denying that the need to compete on the world stage spurred them on in the arms race that Group B had become.

Road going 4 wheel drive was then heavily developed by Audi and others, to the point of delivering the substantial traction gains, and consequent safety improvements with things like ESC, that we now take for granted in our road cars.

It’s worth noting that the Audi Quattro only came to fame as a rally car in the first place because of changes in motorsport regulations that allowed 4WD in rallying. So those people creating the motorsport rules have a lot to answer for in terms of driving multi-manufacturer technical innovation. And that is a very important point to bear in mind as we go forwards.

And sticking with Audi, but returning to the much more predictable world of an empty tarmac racetrack, we were brought this self-driving racing car in 2015. If you look closely at the photo of this supercar precisely cornering near the limit of its grip, you may spot the absence of the usual racing driver. So if this goes wrong, it really can only be the car to blame!

Audi is, or at least was, using that car to challenge motoring journalists to try and beat its lap time in an identical (but conventional) RS7 that they drove themselves.

Here’s a short video clip of it in action: https://youtu.be/Qdp4OlR8ABQ

Three important points to note however are that:

• A racetrack is a relatively safe and predictable environment compared with a gravel rally stage through a forest (where the Audi Ur-Quattro excelled with greater traction than every other vehicle);
• The car runs solo with the track to itself, rather than in a pack surrounded by race traffic jostling for position (where the ABS-braked Mercedes Cosworth excelled by out-braking everything around it);
• If there were people in that RS7 there would always be one of them in the driving seat (to keep Audi’s lawyer’s happy, not worrying about somebody else engaging a bunch of ambulance-chasers if something went wrong).

And, apart from a few minor innovations in road cars and trucks, such as radar that (hopefully – but not always!) applies the brakes in time to avoid a crash if the driver is distracted, or cameras that read signs when the driver doesn’t bother, is about where we are now.

In other words we’re still a long way off the point where we can jump into the back of a car to read a book or have a sleep, and leave it to take us across a continent or even just to the shops, in the same way that a minicab driver might.

I think it’s time for motorsport to step up to the plate again, and help change all that.

What I am going to say next may seem odd.

Very odd if you consider that: I have spent more than 40 years designing, modifying and building competition vehicles as a hobby; I was taught to drive fast on the loose by the late, great Pentti Airikkala (so it’s a skill I’m proud of); I still hold an international rally licence; I used to hold a racing licence too; and (back when there was one) I won the regional autotest championships for 4 years driving a car that I had designed and built in my own garage.

Plus I have a couple of very fast road cars in my drive, a garage with some even faster motorbikes in it, and plans on paper for something much faster still. I’ve also done everything from taking my Land Rover across the Sahara, through passing IAM motorcycle tests with a Class 1 traffic cop in pursuit for almost 100 miles (longer than usual, but we were both having great fun...), to getting myself a licence to drive 44 tonne artics (because I could) and then driving them places nobody else wanted to (because I enjoyed the challenge).

So I’m a driver. An enthusiastic one. And (if I do say so myself) a fairly good one.

So here goes with saying something odd...

We need to take drivers out of motorsport.

At least partially.

Specifically, we need to introduce classes for fully autonomous driverless vehicles in both rallying and touring car racing. Initially the classes will need to run separately for reasons of safety, ultimately they should run together for greater learning and technology improvements.

Both disciplines expand on what Audi has already achieved with its RS7 in the clip above.

Rallying takes Audi’s achievements with its autonomous RS7 on a known and pre-defined circuit and moves them onto a rally stage. It’s still rare to encounter other vehicles (we start at 2 or 3 minute intervals) but the distance covered in a rally is far greater than the length of a race track, the conditions can vary from gravel and dust to snow and ice, and the surface is constantly changing even on a single stage let alone through a season.

A forest stage on gravel is a challenge, because not only is the surface loose (necessitating a sideways driving style to make good progress) but there are often potholes or debris to contend with, and if a wheel does drop into a ditch then getting out again rather than getting stuck or crashing introduces further challenges still. Ice driving, even with studded tyres, is a separate art in itself.

Stuart Turner (former MotorSport journalist, turned boss of both BMC and Ford competition departments) once famously described a forest stage as "One long, controlled accident waiting to happen which is saved at the last moment." And that's a useful skill for a car to possess.

Tarmac is not necessarily much easier if making allowance for pace notes (which most readers should be familiar with, at least in concept) because they invariably contain one or more errors that the driver must correct for “in flight” to avoid a major accident. And ice notes, which are inevitably prone to change due to varying weather by the time the section is reached, can add further challenge still. I wound up in ditch on Epynt once because the pace-note/ice-note combo wasn't quite right, and I was perhaps a little too trusting of what my co-driver was telling me.

When a computer can safely get a car down rally stages as fast as a skilled driver, then the system will truly be at the point of development where it can reliably get a car around empty public roads at more modest speeds in considerably greater safety than the vast majority of people who hold driving licences to use those roads themselves are ever likely to be able.

But that’s empty roads, and the last time I headed out to the shops in my car they were anything but. There was traffic everywhere.

So now let’s build on Audi’s great work with their RS7, but head in a different direction.

The circuit topography can be well known in advance, plotted to the cm (in a way that a rally stage could never be), but that doesn’t account for real world variables such as rain, oil patches, other cars coming very close indeed, and moving hazards (which on a track may be bits of another car sliding around, but on a public road could easily be a football waiting for a child to run out from between parked cars to collect it).

What we need here is to insert fully autonomous cars into a touring car race. Again the classes would need to run separately at the start, while the technology is developed, but should later be mixed in with the human drivers because that is where the maximum learning comes in.

The reason for touring cars is that the field is often packed, with cars running very close to each other, sometimes swapping paint whilst jostling for position, and every change of direction or line through a corner has to take account of (and make predictive allowance for) a large number of surrounding vehicles. The car also needs to handle the unexpected, such as the car in front spinning out mid-corner and then bouncing back off the armco, and handle the idea of overtaking whilst not being overtaken. And it needs to look out for marshals waving cloth flags, and learn not to overtake when the pace car is out!

In short, the technology needs to be able to handle a number of defensive driving challenges that would probably see even the most highly trained Police pursuit drivers sweating nervously given the close proximitt of other vehicles and speeds involved.

Roborace made a small start on this in 2019 but it was only a very small field of cars, all of which were communicating with each other (something that is not viable in the real world of public highways, where vehicles will be a mixture of autonomous and human-driven), but unfortunately it never really caught on anyway (there was no incentive for it to): https://youtu.be/JE4fw0FdAvQ

Once circuit racing is sorted, the technology and systems can then be expanded and further perfected in other sports such as motorcycle circuit racing, where a whole raft of different household name manufacturers are competing, and the doors must surely open for cross-company collaboration in addition to an obvious need to make the systems more physically compact.

Following on from stage rallying an alternative, and far challenging form of motorsport, is long range desert rallying such as the Dakar, the 2022 event is currently taking place in Saudi Arabia even as I type. Here the competitors are to a large extent left to choose the optimum route through a stage (usually several hundred miles long) and between mandatory checkpoints for themselves based on conditions on the ground rather than always following a defined track (so yet more terrain reading for the systems to handle, often in conditions of very challenging light and/or dust). There are other natural hazards for the computer drivers to contend with too, such as herds of wild camels. And who will help the computer out if the car gets stuck and needs a push? It really does need to be on the top of its game in an event like this.

When a computer can successfully pick out and drive a route for an event like the Dakar, finding its own way around inside an unmapped car park before then selecting a space and parking in it should not present any great challenge at all.

Coincidentally, even as I write this article, Audi Sport is competing in Dakar 2022, albeit with human drivers at the wheel of their prototype RS-Q e-trons. And they’re doing well too, as Carlos Sainz has won a stage. Given their pioneering work in the area of autonomous competition vehicles, perhaps they will be the first to pick up the gauntlet I have thrown down above.

Or perhaps Elon Musk and Tesla, who have already changed so much, and who already sell vehicles that are technically capable of driving themselves on public roads but still require the driver to keep their hands on the wheel “just in case” to appease the legal bods, will make the decision to enter motorsport as a further proving area for their already ground-breaking vehicles.

Or maybe there’s another major manufacturer such as Honda, Toyota, Ford or GM who doesn’t want to get left behind. Or perhaps even a smaller challenger, with the benefit of speed and agility on their side, such as ProDrive. Only time will tell.

What is certain however is that competitive motorsport presents a huge number of “real world plus” challenges which, once addressed, should truly provide all the technical solutions necessary for fully autonomous vehicles to share our world with people, and to do so in greater safety than the vast majority of human drivers are ever likely to be able.

And at this point perhaps even the lawyers will stop worrying about the technology, because they will realise that “race and rally proven” is a good thing. It is perhaps the ultimate testing ground. And by then it will be far less likely to result in an insurance claim than allowing a human behind the wheel. And red-tape should not be allowed to act as an excuse to hinder progress.

But there is another huge benefit to be derived from driverless vehicles too that I have not yet mentioned, and that is greater equality for those who are, for whatever reason, unable to drive themselves: People who are currently prevented from driving and thus disadvantaged, due to physical or mental health problems, and are currently reliant on others to get anywhere. An autonomous vehicle that does the driving for them, could finally give them equality of freedom of movement on a par with the rest of society.

The next long-term challenges for us then must surely be:

• how to persuade motorsport legislators to introduce driverless autonomous vehicle classes;
• how to persuade sponsors to support them; and
• how to persuade early-adopter manufacturers to compete in them.

At least, that’s what I think.

That is my vision. Not just for the future of motorsport. But for the future of personal road transport in our world. And for improved road safety for our children and our grand children, and independence and greater freedom for all.

The power source whether it be diesel, petrol, hybrid (PHEV), battery-electric (BEV), hydrogen or whatever is an irrelevance for the purpose of this discussion. What really matters the most I believe, at least as far as safety is concerned, is the single nut behind the steering wheel.

I’d be very interested to learn what you think, so please leave a comment below.