Journey to driverless cars – Levels of automation

Levels of driving automation

This is a text-based alternative to the infographic SAE J3016^TM— Levels of driving automation:

• Level 0 vehicles require the human driver to undertake all driving tasks.
• Level 1 vehicles include driver assist features, such cruise control or lane keeping assist. These technologies can perform 1 aspect of the driving task with monitoring from the driver.
• Level 2 vehicles include advance driver assist features such as emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, auto park assist and traffic jam assist. These technologies can perform a number of aspects of the driving task with monitoring from the driver.
• Level 3 vehicle drives itself for some of the time
• Level 4 vehicle drives itself for most of the time
• Level 5 vehicle drives itself all the time

Levels 0–2

What the human in the driver's seat does

• You are driving whenever these driver support features are engaged—even if your feet are off the pedals and you are not steering.
• You must constantly supervise these support features—you must steer, brake, or accelerate as needed to maintain safety.

Examples of driver support features

• (Level 0) Features limited to providing warnings and momentary assistance, such as:
  • automatic emergency braking
  • blind spot warning
  • lane departure warning.
• (Level 1) These features provide steering or brake/acceleration support to the driver, such as:
  • lane centering
    or 
  • adaptive cruise control.
• (Level 2) These features provide steering and brake/acceleration support to the driver, such as:
  • lane centering and adaptive cruise control at the same time.

Levels 3–5

What the human in the driver's seat does

• You are not driving when these automated driving features are engaged, even if you are seated in the driver's seat.
• (Level 3) There are some cases when a feature will request that you drive.
• (Levels 4 and 5) These automated driving features will not require you to take over driving.

Examples of automated driving features

• (Levels 3 and 4) These features can drive the vehicle under limited conditions and will not operate unless all required conditions are met:
  • (Level 3) traffic jam chauffeur
  • (Level 4) local driverless taxi
  • (Level 4) pedals/steering wheel may or may not be installed.
• (Level 5) This feature can drive the vehicle under all conditions:
  • same as level 4, but the feature can drive anywhere in all conditions.

Journey to Cooperative and Automated Vehicles diagram

This is a text-based alternative to the image Journey to Cooperative and Automated Vehicle initiative.

Autonomous vehicle	Cooperative vehicle	Cooperative automated vehicle
operates in isolation of others uses sensors to see where other vehicles are uses radar, camera, lidar and ultrasonic sensors limited to low range, low speed	communicates with nearby vehicles and infrastructure sees around corners knows what other cooperative vehicles are doing operates in cooperation with others	uses both autonomous and cooperative vehicle capabilities vehicle senses/receives message, i.e. safety hazard vehicle automatically performs corrective task

A Cooperative Intelligent Transport System

This is a text-based alternative to the diagram A Cooperative Intelligent Transport System:

Illustrated image showing connections between different elements of a connected intelligent transport systems. A little blue car with connected vehicle technology is sharing information with another connected vehicle, traffic lights and cloud systems.