From 2020 you will become a permanent back-seat driver’ ran a typically breathless headline from 2015. The story, from The Observer, reflected the optimism that Silicon Valley geniuses were fast clearing the hurdles to self-driving.
That optimism has faded as both car and tech firms begin to acknowledge that training a computer to think faster and smarter than a human amid the myriad of driving situations we encounter daily is tough.
“Everybody talking about autonomous cars four years ago was saying they’d be here by now,” Nick Rogers, head of engineering at Jaguar Land Rover said. “I think we can get 80% of the way there very, very quickly, but when the car’s in charge, the only answer is zero accidents and that’s going to be a challenge for a bit longer.”
Ford put its hand up this year, too. “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” CEO Jim Hackett said. Argo AI, the self-driving tech firm tasked with making Ford’s vision a reality, dampened down expectations of Ford’s self-driving car promised for 2021. CEO Bryan Salesky wrote in a blog last month that the car will operate in only a specific area of a city, won’t be available for purchase and will have a governed top speed.
That puts this Ford car at the lower end of what’s termed level four autonomy: you get to be that permanent back-seat driver, but in limited areas only. Even level three, where you can take your hands off the wheel but must be prepared to take control at a moment’s notice, hasn’t been given the regulatory green light in Europe as hoped, despite Audi offering the technology on its top-end models from 2017.
For car companies, it was a bad case of FOMO (fear of missing out), caught as a result of excess exposure to Californian tech firms and spread around via artful presentations by consultants.
“They’ve been told day in and day out that they are ‘dinosaurs’, that they are going to be ‘disrupted’,” Max Warburton, analyst at Bernstein Research, wrote in an October report. “This repetitive refrain has worn down the decision makers at the top of these companies.”
Join the debate
Add your comment
The end...
Endless possibilities or possibly endless?, with endless scenarios,how is infrastructure going to cope?,just reading some of the posts here giving what ifs that could happen,are we going to be at the behest of autonomous cars and just have to accept we won't be in control?, and as far as safety goes, I still think there will be accidents maybe caused by glitches or cybercrime.
Be careful what you wish for, in terms of autonomous driving...
I've also pondered how autonomous driving cars would deal with a "first world problem" like every car's owners emerging after some performance at "The Met" or <insert your city's biggest high-end opera/theatre house here> and ordering their self-driving cars to come and get them--all at once...
There would be a dozen black automated Mercedes E-classes all contending for the same pick-up spots, and dozens of owners and uber-guests drunkenly trying to decide which ones to get into, and dozens more vehicles arriving to block the parked ones from leaving...
Look at the history of driverless trains...
There have been some successful examples of driverless trains, but only within highly-isolated operating environments. There have been serious attempts to extend those environments, e.g. in Rio Tinto's AutoHaul program, but that example has even today run several years behind schedule, and hundreds of millions over budget, with program success well short of original goals.
Any autonomous car-driving program has to deal with a far more chaotic environment than AutoHaul, in terms of road markings (or fading or lack thereof), road condition, differing kinds of traffic signalling (and signal failure conditions) by local jurisdiction, inclement weather, other driver behaviour, and the uncertain legal environment surrounding liability for mishap, damage, and death.
And that's just in a first-world context. Imagine what it takes to appropriately program an autonomous car to operate "as an owner would expect" in accordance with traffic conditions in Moscow vs Mumbai vs Shanghai vs Djakarta vs Dubai.