Self-driving cars: What will it look and feel like to take our hands off the wheel?
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. (CBS) -- Imagine a world where your commute to work is your actual office, or where you can comfort your crying child in the backseat without having to pull off the road.
Self-driving cars have been held up as the future of the automotive industry for several years—but how close are we really to being able to take our hands off the wheel for good, and what will it look like when it happens?
One has to hand it to Hollywood, where they know how to make us fantasize about the future of driving. Flying cars may still be the stuff of "The Jetsons" and their Googie-style image of the 21st century as envisioned in 1962, or "Back to the Future Part II"—that 1989 classic in which "the future" that Doc Brown and Marty McFly visited is now nearly a decade in the past.
But this story is not about flying cars. What about a car so smart that all we have to do is kick back and ride while the car drives itself?
We started our search for answers at Packey Webb Ford in Downers Grove.
"A world where there is 100% automation, 100% of the time, in 100% of the places is still a long ways away," said Ashley Lambrix, the general manager of BlueCruise. "But the exciting part is the future is upon us now."
BlueCruise is the Active Driving Assist System available in some Ford vehicles. It is the software that makes autonomous driving possible—as in the car's computers and sensors can drive for you.
"It builds on trusted technologies like adaptive cruise control and lane centering, and adds on that ability for you to drive hands free on the highway," said Lambrix.
That's right, hands free.
A lot of consumers have their doubts about such technology. This year, AAA found 66% of drivers surveyed expressed fear about fully self-driving vehicles.
For this story, we pulled onto the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway—one of the major highways located mostly outside of major cities where drivers can use the self-driving feature.
Upon hitting the adaptive cruise control button, a display says "hands-free,"—and drivers can take their hands off the wheel. From there, the car just drives by itself.
But a camera on the dash still watches the driver, who is expected to pay attention.
"If you take your eyes off the road for too long, there is a set of escalation warnings that are audio, visual, and then haptic to alert you to resume your attention to the road," Lambrix said.
In an emergency, drivers can take back over at any time. But even knowing that, as Marie Saavedra sat behind the wheel of a car that was driving by itself with adaptive cruise control, her physical reaction was what surprised her the most.
"I'm like out of my body right now. I don't know what to do with my hands, you know, because it's fighting against that habit," Saavedra said, "but I feel very—it's keeping me within a good distance of everybody, and—wow."
BlueCruise technology falls into six levels of automation, determined by the Society of Automotive Engineers.
- At Level 0, there is no computer assistance, and the driver drives the car as normal.
- At Level 1, it's feet off, while adaptive cruise control takes over to brake and speed.
- At Level 2, it's hands off, with lane centering and some help steering.
But in each of these three levels, the driver must go on paying full attention—hands on the wheel or not. The Ford in which Saavedra was behind the wheel was a Level 2.
"I think most cars today will be somewhere between Level 1 and Level 2," said Philipp Kampshoff, a senior partner with McKinsey & Company and a consultant in the auto industry.
CBS News Chicago asked Kampshoff to explain the next three levels of automation.
"Level 3 would be what we would say, hands off, eyes off, brain on," Kampshoff said.
Level 3 would be highly automated. BMW has Level 3 self-driving technology in its 7 series—saying drivers can read, work, or watch videos in some conditions. But the driver still needs to be ready to take over in seconds.
Level 4 is fully automated, and is on the roads right now in the form of the driverless taxi.
"We're seeing them being deployed already in San Francisco and Phoenix," Kampshoff said. "They're coming now to LA, Houston, Austin, Atlanta."
Warmer weather in those cities means fewer obstacles.
"So that's still going to take a couple of years until we see robotaxis sort of move up into the Snow Belt," Kampshoff said.
So don't hold your breath for a rollout in Chicago just yet. But when it happens, that would be Level 5—a driverless car that can operate in any conditions.
But even then, would you get in one?
Customers have to feel safe. Cities and states have to think about added traffic and regulations. And hailing a cab is one thing, but paying for systems like BlueCruise and other companies' similar features can send price tags out of the budget of some everyday car buyers.
Still, Kampshoff believes the growing pains of new tech will be worth it.
"I mean, there's 40,000 people that die in car accidents every year, right?" And the third of our carbon emissions are causing a cost from transportation, right? And we're wasting 60 minutes per day in the car every day. All of that we can change," Kampshoff said. "But it it's a question, of how fast can we get the technology and the adoption at scale?
Back in the car I-88, Saavedra was behind the wheel for an automated lane change. All it took was a tap of the turns signal.
It did seem that hands-free driving might make a ride more physically relaxing.
"It is mimicking the behavior of an active driver just to give that increased comfort," Lambrix said.
So it's not a flying car. But the features do feel futuristic—and by 2034, the industry hopes they'll feel more common place.
"As someone who's, you know, admittedly not a car girl, I did not have a sense, really, of this technology in a tangible way until being behind the wheel like this," Saavedra said, "so it's very interesting, and it does make me curious about what the future holds."
Consumer Reports ranks Ford's BlueCruise the number one driver assistance system on the road.