In the future, it seems the one thing a self-driving car won’t need is a steering wheel. Automotive giant Ford has filed a patent that will let you take over from your AI driver with that most ubiquitous device of our times – the smartphone. The company recently obtained a patent from the US Patent and Trademarks office for two alternate driving modes. Both involve using a touchscreen device to steer an otherwise autonomous vehicle.

Will This New Patent Allow You To Steer Your Self-Driving Car With Your Phone?

You could hold your smartphone like a steering wheel and tilt to navigate, much like you would in smartphone games like Need for Speed, or Real Racing. The accelerometer and gyroscope in your phone measures your motions and the action of a steering wheel. The second option is  to use your finger to turn a steering wheel displayed on the touchscreen. 

that sounds like you’ll have limited control, you’re right. You won’t necessarily be given full control of the vehicle; acceleration and braking would probably still be controlled by the car’s computer. It’s clearly a safety measure designed into the feature, to stop any untoward accidents. The idea is simply to let you steer the car when forcing a lane change on the highway perhaps, or maybe guiding the car through an area it hasn’t mapped or doesn’t recognise.

NEED FOR SPEED: NO LIMITS - COURTESY EA GAMEs

Of course, there’s no guarantee this will actually ever be a feature in any self-driving car. Patents merely let companies claim initial ideas, but it’s only later in the development stage that they figure out whether it’s really feasible to build. Indeed, this particular idea already has issues, like how to bridge a lag in the connection to keep your car as responsive to your steering as possible. Another major concern is how much easier this kind of system makes it for a hacker to hijack your autonomous car’s control.

We will have to come up with alternatives like this, as we’ve not yet discovered a way to make self-driving cars completely infallible. At some point or the other, you’ll probably be required to take over to navigate through a tricky situation. And when that happens, you need an incredibly safe and stable system you can rely on.