Towards Next-Generation Vehicles Featuring the Vehicle Intelligence

Safe driving and minimizing the number of casualties are the main motivations of researchers and car companies for decades. They also care very much on saving fuel consumption and high comfort-level trips. With the help of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications, safer, more comfortable, and greener trips are very likely at the present time. However, today humankind is very close to make a very old dream, namely, driverless vehicles, to come true. In this paper, we address the concept of next-generation vehicles, their requirements, challenges, advantages, and problems. Regarding Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), levels (1-5), we first define the crucial contexts for next-generation vehicles. We then discuss existing ADAS, their abilities, and available platforms which they run on from past to present. Next, we introduce a novel vehicle intelligence (VI) architecture consisting of ADAS modules and VI services which would pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles regarding not only driving issue, but also human-centric new demands such as entertainment and comfort level of the journey. The proposed conceptual design is built on sensors, vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs), and big data. Afterward, we describe how current ADAS applications would transform on the way toward SAE Level 5 cars. We finally discuss the open issues for next-generation vehicles.