Jaguar Land Rover R&D Boss Defies Robopocalypse: "People are not Cargo"

Jaguar Land Rover will never make a driverless car, r&d boss Wolfgang Epple said.

“We don't consider customers cargo. We don't want to build a robot that delivers the cargo from A to B,” he told journalists at an event held at JLR's r&d center here in central England.

Epple said JLR is working on autonomous driving features for future models, including a remote control function to allow the driver to operate the car outside the vehicle using a smartphone.

Epple favors autonomous features that assist drivers without taking full control from them, such as the ability to steer the car into a tight parking space from outside the vehicle. JLR used the June 16 event to show a Range Rover that could automatically execute a multi-point turn in the road and be maneuvered around obstacles on very rough terrain remotely using a smartphone. Both features could be available by 2020, the automaker said.

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