Intelligent and connected vehicles: Current situation, future directions, and challenges

Given their large retention number worldwide, vehicles, as a very important part of the emerging Internet of Things, have been stably evolving toward becoming highly connected, intelligent, and autonomous. Since the very first experiment on an American Wonder by Francis P Houdina in 1925, autonomous driving has attracted intensive research interest from standards organizations, industry, as well as academia. In this article, we first present an overview of the current progress and achievements, then envision the future evolution directions of autonomous driving systems. Besides describing the representative functional modules, we also discuss the critical enabling technologies, and identify the security concerns and corresponding countermeasures.