Self-driving cars need standards, but whose?

There are signs that autonomous cars have arrived - and may be driving our city streets

The PC revolution, the internet boom, the smartphone economy — all were propelled along by a common set of technological standards. So will a standard platform or operating system be necessary to get autonomous cars rolling, too?

“There is certainly no doubt that many carmakers have expressed the idea that a more standardised platform would be attractive,” said John Wall, a senior vice-president at QNX, which develops software that is used in millions of vehicles today.

Car companies have come to realise that existing in-car systems, with their tangled layers of software and morass of hundreds of embedded processors, are