- IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving is a licensable software stack for automotive companies
- The software is an L2+ driver-assistance platform, considered to be the “sweet spot” of autonomous driving
- The L2+ automation system is capable of self-driving while a human remains responsible for the vehicle
IDrive, the cloud storage provider which recently branched into autonomous driving software, is offering a licensable software stack, IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving. Available for autonomous vehicle manufacturers to license from today, it is intended to enable companies without their own in-house autonomous driving system to deliver self-driving technology to customers.
The driver assistance platform is an L2+ system, which makes it suitable for companies aiming at customers who want a self-driving vehicle while retaining overall control. This is considered to be the market hot spot, where drivers prefer not to hand over total control to the autonomous driving system.
IDrive Autonomy is aiming to fill a gap in the market, offering a shortcut to self-driving car manufacturers – and it is already being tested in the field.
What is L2+?
Collating the data required to teach driving autonomy results in several degrees of saleable automation. Level 2 (L2) is partial automation (hands on, eyes on), whereas Level 3 is conditional automation (eyes-off, hands-off).
L2+ somewhere in between, a marketing standard that signifies reliable self-driving, but leaves the person in the driving seat fully responsible for the vehicle – essentially, “eyes-on, hands-off.” In terms of the technology, it combines crowdsourced mapping and multi-camera arrays to provide hands-free driving along long stretches of highway. This type of autonomous driving offers automatic lane changes, traffic jam support, and continuous driver monitoring.
It seems that the key to IDrive’s offering is the L2+ and its ability to provide this on a relatively affordable stack. Rather than wait for the wider industry to build its own systems and train its own autonomous driving models, IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving offers the model out, at a cost per car.
Complete assisted-driving stack
This different approach means that instead of selling a full car autonomous hardware kit, IDrive is offering the “brains” for self-driving, a $1,500 full stack deployment. It’s been built on a foundation model, it’s been trained… and it continues to be trained.
“The industry has spent years chasing the dream of full self-driving, but FSD is an entirely different problem,” said Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of IDrive. “You are not just solving a perception and driving problem, you are taking on an enormous safety, validation, regulatory and liability burden. That makes a fully autonomous system extremely difficult to commercialize and even harder to license as a general-purpose product.”
Vehicles sold with IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving will have the intelligence, the software, and camera hardware from IDrive included. “We believe L2+ is where the real opportunity is today. Automakers want better driver assistance, but they don’t want to reinvent the entire autonomy stack.”
