State of the art in self-driving cars at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Self-driving cars have changed the tenor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas since they first appeared there.

An autonomous-driving Lincoln MKZ gives demonstration rides during the 2017 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada. Steve Marcus / Reuters

LAS VEGAS // It may not seem like it at first, but the conspicuous red button in the centre console of the Lincoln MKZ I’m sitting in is perhaps the best example of how the world has changed over the past decade.

The car isn’t just a regular car – it’s a self-driving autonomous vehicle – and pushing the button would bring it to a screeching emergency halt.

It’s a necessary precaution installed by Ford, Lincoln’s manufacturer, and BlackBerry, the smartphone maker. The two companies are jointly developing the vehicle and recently received regulatory clearance to begin testing it on the icy roads of Canada.

They’re just about ready to do so, but in the meantime they’re giving rides to attendees at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show itself is a juggernaut – attracting more than 165,000 attendees and nearly 4,000 exhibitors from around the world, it’s one of the world’s largest tech events. In its 50 years, CES has launched numerous game-changing technologies including the VCR, high-definition television and the first Xbox.

Add self-driving cars to the list. I had the fortune of riding in an autonomous SUV built by General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University at the 2008 show and the progress since then has been incredible.

Nine years ago, the hefty GM vehicle was buried under laser sensors, cameras, GPS devices and other hardware strapped to its roof, while its interior was swarming with computers, monitors and additional gear. It was like riding in a living lab.

Today’s sleek Lincoln, however, is nearly indistinguishable from any car you might see at the nearest dealer. Much of the technology that enables the vehicle to drive itself has melted away, hidden now within its normal aesthetics. Except, of course, for that red button.

Progress is evident in more than just appearance, of course. In the past year alone, self-driving cars have taken to the streets as taxis, trucks and buses in the United States, Singapore, Australia and elsewhere. Countries including Canada are running tests, while others have definitive rollout plans in place. UAE officials, for example, want to have autonomous vehicles on the roads by 2019.

Self-driving cars have also changed the tenor of CES itself since they first appeared here. In 2008, few vehicle makers gave much thought to the show, opting instead to unveil their latest innovations at auto-specific events.

But CES has since become vital to their marketing efforts. All of them, without exception, now splurge on giant booths and outdoor tents to showcase their developments. Top executives from the larger manufacturers have supplanted the likes of Bill Gates and other leaders from traditional technology companies in presenting keynote addresses.

“In recent years, CES has started to look more and more like an auto show,” Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn said in his keynote speech on Thursday. “We’re now competing on introducing new breakthrough technologies.”

Nissan, its massive booth right next to BlackBerry’s in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, used this year’s show – which wrapped up yesterday – to unveil its long-term plan for self-driving cars. The Japanese company plans to have 10 vehicle models with self-driving functions by 2020, with autonomy coming in four phases.

The first phase, already under way, equips vehicles with ProPilot, a feature that lets cars drive themselves in a single motor-way lane. Phase two, which will allow for self-driving across multiple lanes, is due next year, while phase three will add auto-nomous city driving by 2020. The fourth and final phase, whose timeline the company won’t commit to yet, is full auto-nomy.

“The prototype is ready and it works perfectly well,” Mr Ghosn said in a round-table discussion with journalists after his speech. “This is ready today, but mass market is a completely different story.”

Other car makers also unveiled self-driving plans at CES with varying degrees of ambition. Ford, for example, wants to have vehicles without steering wheels or brake pedals on the roads by 2021, while BMW doesn’t expect fully autonomous vehicles until around 2030.

Faraday Future, a US-based start-up funded by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, kicked off this year’s show with a demonstration of its production-ready FF91 – an electric vehicle that will be able to find its own parking space.

The company spent much of 2016 mired in controversy, including delays at its Nevada plant because of funding shortfalls from its mysterious founder, but it’s part of a wave of new upstarts – including Tesla and Uber – that are pushing the old guard towards autonomy and vehicle electrification and connectivity.

Numerous studies are also now predicting that self-driving vehicles will take over large swaths of human jobs, replacing taxi and lorry drivers.

Nissan’s strategy, however, suggests at least one new category could arise with increased automation. The company plans to keep humans involved even with full self-driving, with remote operators taking over for robot cars that encounter problems they can’t independently solve.

Using satellite imagery and the car’s own cameras and sensors, human operators could plot routes around unexpected obstacles – construction zones or accidents, for example – much like air-traffic controllers do with planes.

That could make for an entirely new class of jobs while at the same time alleviating car occupants from having to actually drive.

“Show me an autonomous system without a human in the loop and I’ll show you a system that is useless,” said Nissan research director Maarten Sierhuis during the company’s keynote. “The world is simply too complex.”

It’s a great explanation for why, despite all the progress of the past decade, there’s still that big red button to push.

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