Ford New Patent Let You Control Steering Wheel With Just A Smartphone

Since its first days, self-driving cars has been equipped with many new features to step by step become completely autonomous. Surprisingly, this futurist cars will soon need no steering wheel anymore. Our smartphones will be in charge of driving the cars replacing the wheel.

It is all thanks to Ford, one of the biggest auto manufacturers as well as automotive giants unveiled that they have successfully got a patent to help the driver control their cars with smartphones. The AI driver can soon rest after the US Patent and Trademarks office giving Ford a patent for their two modes of alternate driving. The keys of these two designs have no differences to each other. A touchscreen device will be the only thing the autonomous cars’ drivers need, giving them the chance to experience the first interesting technology of driving.

The control of this feature is very simple. To drive the car instead of controlling the physical wheel as before, one just need to have their smartphones alongside and treat it like a real wheel. For navigation, drivers need to tilt their devices, just like when they play car racing game such as Need for Speed or Real racing. The driver’s motion will also be shown through the program measures in their phones, while they holding their phone pretending it is a real wheel. If drivers don’t frequently play such racing game and feel strange with the control, there is an alternative way for them to drive for their AI driver. A steering wheel will also be able to appear on their phone’s screens, therefore the drivers can easily control the car by using their finger turning the virtual wheel in the phone.

However, this kind of driving will also give drivers not fully control of their vehicles. The car’s computer will perhaps still be in charge of break hitting and acceleration. This is eventually for the drivers’ safe when they are about to take any accidents coming. Moreover, maybe the feature will only provide the drivers control of steering when they want to force the car to change its highway lane or help the car safely across a completely strange area that its map has not updated or can’t recognize.

On the other hand, there is still no official announcement of the feature to become in use in self-driving cars. With patents, Ford as well as other companies only claimed their ideas to belong to them right at first. To make the patent become real production, it will need several analyses and developments to consider whether the idea is able to be began designing. In fact, although the feature has not appeared in the public, but its creators have found several limitations in their patent. As smartphones can have poor connection leading the virtual wheel not to effectively respond to the car, therefore drivers can’t control the car properly and might have crashes. More importantly, as it can easily happen with a simple smartphone, the car control will be a potential source for hackers to harm the driver and their car.

Until now, self-driving cars however are still not fully trusted as they are AI, not the human’s control. Although it has brought to drivers in particular and human in general many benefits, but before it is completely designed and developed to be a trustworthy vehicle, people are suggested to use their own control for their car, because who will be such busy not to be able to control their car while driving and then lead themselves into accidents?