Automated cars are just around the corner

The car that could drive you to work -- and then park itself after it drops you at the front door -- is just around the corner.

German maker Audi says the technology is ready to take the daily grind out of stop-start traffic, the only barrier is government regulations.

But don’t expect to be able to read a newspaper, do your makeup or update your social media status while on the move. The company plans to install technology to make sure the driver is still alert.

“To hand over control [of the car] in stop and go traffic, we are there,” the head of Audi’s technical development, Wolfgang Durheimer, told News Limited at the Geneva motor show overnight.

“The future has arrived. We know how to do it. But you cannot sit in the back seat. It will monitor whether the driver is still there and as soon as you disappear from your driver’s position, we will stop the car and it will activate the emergency brake.”

The car can also intervene if the driver is not paying full attention. “We have the intelligence in the car. We have the cameras, the radar detection, the sensors, the speed limiters. The next step is to monitor the driver and look at eye contact. If they are not concentrating we can blow a horn or shake the seat.”

Audi and its partner company Volkswagen are also well progressed with technology that will enable cars to go and park themselves with the touch of a smartphone. “You will be able to tap your phone and the car goes and parks itself,” Durheimer said. “Later, when you want to go home, you press the phone again and the car will come to collect you.”

However the autonomous parking system only works in car parks equipped with the same technology. The company has a demonstration facility at its test centre in California. The system is ready and could be available on customer cars as early as 2015. “We just now wait for customer demand,” he said.

Audi says the “piloted driving” systems will more likely arrive on its next generation flagship limousine, the A8, the current version of which costs about $200,000 in Australia. “We talk about piloted driving because a pilot is always alert ... ready to take over,” he says. It is most likely that government regulations will only allow autonomous driving systems to work at low speeds, less than 20km/h.

“We want to help the driver in traffic jams and boring situations that absorb energy and waste time, not take total control at high speed,” he said. Audi is already running trials of autonomous cars in its hometown of Ingolstadt in Germany. To date it has no reports of crashes.

Meanwhile Google says the only time one of its experimental automated cars was involved in a crash, it was due to driver error.

This reporter is on Twitter: @JoshuaDowling