Roundup: Who's in fastlane for self-driving vehicles

Despite a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S being driven by its Autopilot feature, self-driving technology development won't be halt. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk is not the only one dreaming of a self-driving future.

With the coming autonomous cars heat, self-driving technology has become more and more ubiquitous among auto industry and tech companies.

In the crowded field, Google is the acknowledged leader with its self-driving car often making headlines. The tech giant tested its self-driving car prototype on employees a few years ago and said it hopes to put such vehicles on the market at the soonest by 2019.

When Google's project is still very much in experimental mode, Tesla is already selling its partially autonomous cars. But the company has come under fire for deploying autopilot technology that appears to have contributed to at least one fatality that killed a driver in Florida using the feature in May and possibly a couple of other crashes.

As a controversy around Tesla's Autopilot feature continues to ramp up, Musk recently announced the second phase of its master plan for the future, which includes making self-driving cars 10 times safer than those driven by humans.

Autonomous vehicles still seem to be in the early experimental stage, all contenders in the world are racing to perfect self-driving technologies and are working to develop their own versions.

In a recent study, published in April, which looks at self-driving car initiatives among 12 companies, carmakers, not technology companies, are in the driver' s seat in developing autonomous cars. In its rankings, Lux Research puts Japan' s Toyota Motor Corp in the lead, followed by Mercedes-Benz and Honda. BMW and Tesla both rated relatively highly, but were not in the lead.

While mass-market adoption is still several years away, but 2016 will be another important year dominated by autonomous car stories, involving many new players and new partnerships.

Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies, Inc. has begun testing a self-driving car in Pittsburgh. And Lyft, Uber's biggest rival in the U.S. market, has partnered up with General Motors in developing and promoting autonomous vehicles.

In China, there are also many new players of this field.

BYD is one of them. The China-based electric car manufacturer has been developing its self-driving technologies both in house as well as partner with Chinese Internet giant Baidu. It's noted that BYD's partnership with Baidu will mainly focus on the mapservice needed for self-driving vehicles.

"We will make the safest vehicle in the world," Stella Li, president of BYD Motors and senior vice president of BYD company Limited, told Xinhua.

Other Chinese companies, including Chery Automobile, Baic Motor Corporation as well as Internet company LeTV also unveiled cars with self-driving functions early this year.

In April, two self-driving cars vehicles, produced by Chang'an Automobile, wrapped up a 2,000-km journey in China's first long-distance road test for autonomous vehicles. The maximum speed of the cars reached 120 kilometers per hour. The company plans to put driverless cars into commercial use in 2018.

Baidu, China's largest search engine provider, also has big plans for self-driving cars. The online search company debuted its driverless car last year and generated a lot of excitement when it successfully completed a rigorous road test in Beijing in December. The company is aiming to commercialize the driverless technology by 2018 and to achieve mass production of the cars by 2020.

One of the biggest challenge is to make self-driving cars as safe as possible under all conditions. Many tech companies are moving in this direction.

Mobileye, the Israeli technology company helping power Tesla and other carmakers' autonomous driving technologies, said that it has worked with China' s Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport to test the company's collision avoidance technology on commercial vehicles.

The company also announced that it teams up with BMW Group and Intel to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.

Many experts in this field agree future self-driving technology could save numerous lives in vehicle accidents involving human errors. According to US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), there are around 32,500 traffic fatalities that occurred on US roads in 2015 with 94 percent of those attributable to driver choices and human error.

But the road to self-driving cars isn' t just about technology. Public also need to understand and learn the limitations of the current technologies. Currently, features such as Tesla's Autopilot is a driver assistance system, and a damned good one, but it's not a driver replacement system.

Recent incidents involving Tesla's autopilot function also raise questions about whether these partially autonomous technologies should be fielded before full government regulation.

The U.S. government seems will not abandon efforts to speed the development of self-driving car. Local media quoted Mark Rosekind, head of NHTSA, as saying that and the agency is bullish on the potential of autonomous driving technology. Endit