Honda Wants Level 4 Self-Driving Cars by 2025
In less than a decade, Honda believes its cars will be able to drive themselves in most circumstances.

Honda is the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan.
The SAE scale includes six levels of autonomy, from zero to five. While Level 5 is defined as a car that is designed to operate entirely without a human driver under all circumstances, Level 4 applies to cars that can fully drive themselves, but may only be able to operate autonomously in certain routes or areas.
Honda is currently testing self-driving cars both at its own R&D center in Japan and at GoMentum Station, a dedicated autonomous-car test facility built on the site of a decommissioned Navy base in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, the company's efforts have been somewhat lower profile, and smaller scale, than some of its competitors' endeavors.
Late last year, Honda and Waymo announced that they were discussing a possible partnership. Waymo is already aligned with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), which supplied the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans that replaced Google-era electric pod cars and assorted Toyota and Lexus hybrids in Waymo's test fleet. Waymo also recently struck a deal with Lyft to collaborate on self-driving cars.
Honda previously said it would achieve Level 3 autonomy by 2020, so it expects to go from semi-autonomous to basically fully-autonomous cars in five years. While the technology to make a car fully autonomous isn't vastly different from even the tech that backs driver-assist systems like adaptive cruise control, that's still a pretty ambitious goal. While significant resources across multiple companies are being devoted to self-driving cars, replacing human drivers is a complex problem. Automakers and tech companies have proven that cars can drive themselves in principle—but that's different from saying that self-driving cars can handle anything the real world can throw at them, day in and day out, indefinitely.
Honda and its competitors may be capable of putting self-driving cars into production within the next decade. The question is: How good will those cars actually be when they arrive?
-
RELATEDBosch, TomTom Hatch Plan to Make Super-Accurate Maps for Self-Driving CarsA "radar road signature" could position self-driving cars with great accuracy, Bosch says.READ NOW
-
RELATEDNuTonomy and Lyft Joining Forces on Self-Driving CarsLyft will integrate its ride-share app with NuTonomy self-driving cars currently testing in Boston.READ NOW
-
RELATEDHere's Why Intel Thinks Self-Driving Cars Will Be a $7 Trillion BusinessSharing services and smartphones will be the key, the tech company says.READ NOW
-
RELATEDWatch BMW Explain the Five Levels of Autonomous Driving"Level 5" autonomy should start reaching select cities in the year 2020, but what does that even mean?READ NOW
-
RELATEDDelphi, French Transit Operator Developing Self-Driving Car Shuttle ProjectDelphi and government-controlled Transdev Group will test an on-demand shuttle service using autonomous vehicles.READ NOW