Journey to driverless cars – Levels of automation

Levels of driving automation

This is a text-based alternative to the infographic SAE J3016TM 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.