El Paso Has a Great Challenge for ADAS Systems – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

When it comes to developing driver assist systems, autonomous vehicles, or even aiming for self-driving cars, it’s never easy. Even corporate behemoths like GM have been struggling to stay in the game when the challenges got to be too much and incidents on the road led to a loss of public and regulator confidence. Dense urban and busy suburban environments simply have too many edge cases for most systems to cope without a safety driver or owner supervision. 

While busy traffic in the city can generate a lot of edge cases, that doesn’t mean that highway driving is totally in the bag. Even Tesla’s “FSD Supervised” system or whatever they’re calling it now still requires hands and eyes on the highway, and Waymo only operates on a limited set of geofenced and mapped freeways. So, if you’re looking to really test the pants off an autonomous driving system, you’ll still want to be looking for challenging highways to tackle along with challenging city routes.

A fellow EV enthusiast I know in southern New Mexico recently identified a perfect place to test ADAS and aspiring autonomous driving systems, and he recently took a variant of the open source Comma driving system on it.

El Paso, Texas has a unique geographic layout. Unlike most cities that run along a river or coast, or grow out from an urban core using piped-in water, El Paso had to deal with a mountainous chokepoint. The city first grew along the river near where the mountains in the U.S. and the mountains in Mexico let the river through. But, the city grew during two very different time periods, first along the river and in a dense urban core, and then even more during times where suburban sprawl became normal.

Away from the chasm that the river had carved out and away from the arroyos between the mountains and the river, land was relatively flat. Around a million years ago, the whole region was under hundreds of feet of water, a large lake scientists today call Lake Cabeza de Vaca. At that time, the Rio Grande only flowed to the region near El Paso, where it ran into a natural rock dam. The water backed up, filling most of present-day El Paso, Las Cruces, Juarez, parts of Chihuahua, and the Tularosa Basin, where present-day White Sands National park is.

Eventually, the dam broke and the area drained, leaving behind smaller seasonal lakebeds (playas) and a whole lot of flat sediment that had collected at the bottom. The river then cut a trench in the deep mud as it dried, getting itself mostly stuck in the valleys it goes through today.

When the economy shifted, automobiles took over, and suburban sprawl began to spread away from downtown, all of this flat land where the lake had been northeast of the city was the ideal place for subdivision after subdivision to be built for lower costs. Today, low density houses and businesses spread almost to the New Mexico state line and have filled up a large chunk of the bottom of the Tularosa Basin. An exurb, the formerly small town of Chaparral, New Mexico, also houses many people who work in El Paso and at Fort Bliss.

Because cheaper growth followed the old lakebeds, it avoided the rugged Franklin Mountains, which were never fully inundated by the water. This led to a very stranged U-shaped city, wrapping along both sides of the mountain chain and meeting at the bottom downtown. After decades and decades of growth, driving times from the northeast part of the city and the northwest portions of the metro area became extremely long, leading to demand for a freeway across the mountains.

This eventually became Transmountain Road, or the Transmountain Freeway section of Texas Loop 375. Other plans for roads crossing the steep, rugged mountains never came to fruition (one four-lane road, Hondo Pass, abruptly ends at the feet of the mountains today. Another road that crosses a pass in the mountains in New Mexico was one of the most dangerous roads in the United States until it was upgraded to four lanes recently.

Today, you can drive out of El Paso, into the mountains, and then back into El Paso again! But, it’s not an easy drive. Steep climbs, tight turns, and sometimes heavy traffic all conspire to make for a challenging drive for anyone. What goes up into the mountains must also come back down to the desert floor, which is great for EVs as they can regeneratively brake on the way down. But, it often requires planning ahead for curves and taking it real easy during inclement weather.

In the video, ArtiePenguin1 sees is his Kia EV6 with a Comma driving system can handle all of that. He starts the video at the top of the pass, driving downhill toward Northeast El Paso. He’s using Sunny Pilot, a version of OpenPilot that allows the driver to control speed and let the ADAS software control the steering. This is safer for downhill descents, as it lets a person anticipate turns and slow down safely using regenerative braking. But, the route has some fairly sharp high speed turns that can still be a big challenge to Comma hardware and OpenPilot software.

When watching the video, keep in mind that he likes to set his ADAS screen and car to km/h instead of MPH, so when it says “95”, that’s just short of 60 MPH and pretty close to the speed limit of 55 on the route.

Once the larger curves start, the system did briefly hit a rumble strip, but didn’t do anything dangerous. On even sharper curves not long later, it required a tiny nudge to stay inside the lane lines. Passing the picnic area, it was able to maintain a good match with the flow of traffic without trouble maintaining a good lock onto the lane.

At the very bottom of the hill, the Transmountain highway meets US-54 (the “North-South Freeway”), and the system was able to handle the transition to the next highway via offramps and onramps.

At this point, I’d be curious to see whether other systems like Tesla FSD Supervised, Supercruise, Blue Cruise, and others do well on Transmountain. Specifically, would an ADAS system be able to navigate a mountainous freeway that requires slowing down a bit ahead of curves, avoiding running into chicken drivers who slam the brakes, and also staying with the flow of traffic?

Featured image: a screenshot from the embedded video (fair use).