There is a lot of talk about autonomous driving, experimentation and future projects, but at what point is the giant Stellantis? The answer is complicated because after the merger between the FCA and PSA groups with 14 brands involved, understanding the state of the driveless technology of Peugeot, Opel, Fiat, Alfa and partners was in fact impossible. But now it is Stellantis herself who opens her more or less secret archives and shares the results of the “L3Pilot” autonomous driving project. This is the name of the European research and innovation project which aims to test the feasibility of Level 3 autonomous driving functions on public roads.
Stellantis, all the numbers of the L3Pilot autonomous driving project
And from the numbers of four years of great work, it turns out that the project involved something like 34 partners including suppliers, research institutes, road authorities. For the construction of 70 cars equipped with automated driving functions in 14 pilot sites and seven countries and 750 professional drivers, experts in SAE level 3 functions, both as drivers and passengers. An important number, which then translated into 400,000 km traveled on motorways, half of which in automated mode and half traveled as a reference and 24,000 km traveled in urban scenarios, of which 22,200 km in automated mode and 1,800 km traveled as a reference.
Just to understand, at SAE level 3 the driver does not need to constantly monitor the driving situation, but must regain control when the system requires it. A complicated thing therefore that threw testers into complicated driving situations, such as parking, overtaking on the motorway, crossing urban intersections and close-range scenarios.
And how it really went, for now, Stellantis does not say. It is okay to reveal the projects and give the numbers, but it is clear that the Italian-French giant does not want to give the competition an advantage.
So in Turin they just say that “The feedback from all partners will help define the necessary system requirements and a code of good practice. L3Pilot has provided an important contribution in testing the automated driving functions, in analyzing the performance of autonomous systems from the user’s point of view and in understanding the impact of the diffusion of the technology on road safety in mixed traffic contexts ”. But to know these famous “feedback” we have to wait a short time: based on the results obtained by L3Pilot, Stellantis will continue to contribute to the large-scale development of the technology with the next project co-financed by the European Union: Hi-Drive (2021-2025) . So it will probably be the UE itself through Hi-Drive to tell us how the self-driving car travels.
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