  Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have unlocked new prospects in
autonomous driving, yet the experimental settings of these studies are
preliminary, over-simplified, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world
driving scenarios in human environments. It remains under-explored whether FM
agents can handle long-horizon navigation tasks with free-from dialogue and
deal with unexpected situations caused by environmental dynamics or task
changes. To explore the capabilities and boundaries of FMs faced with the
challenges above, we introduce DriVLMe, a video-language-model-based agent to
facilitate natural and effective communication between humans and autonomous
vehicles that perceive the environment and navigate. We develop DriVLMe from
both embodied experiences in a simulated environment and social experiences
from real human dialogue. While DriVLMe demonstrates competitive performance in
both open-loop benchmarks and closed-loop human studies, we reveal several
limitations and challenges, including unacceptable inference time, imbalanced
training data, limited visual understanding, challenges with multi-turn
interactions, simplified language generation from robotic experiences, and
difficulties in handling on-the-fly unexpected situations like environmental
dynamics and task changes.
