The Long and Lucrative Mirage of the Driverless Car

[FrodosNewPet]

The Long and Lucrative Mirage of the Driverless Car

For years, Silicon Valley giants and Detroit automakers alike have sold the public visions of a utopia featuring autonomous vehicles. That reality is still far off, but that hasn’t stopped companies from cashing in on repeated promises that suggest otherwise.

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/5/16/18625127/driverless-cars-mirage-uber-lyft-tesla-timeline-profitability

By Victor Luckerson May 16, 2019, 9:21am EDT

For Elon Musk, the driverless car is always right around the corner. At an investor day event last month focused on Tesla’s autonomous driving technology, the CEO predicted that his company would have a million cars on the road next year with self-driving hardware “at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention.” That means Level 5 autonomy, per the Society of Automotive Engineers, or a vehicle that can travel on any road at any time without human intervention. It’s a level of technological advancement I once compared to the Batmobile.

Musk has made these kinds of claims before. In 2015 he predicted that Teslas would have “complete autonomy” by 2017 and a regulatory green light a year later. In 2016 he said that a Tesla would be able to drive itself from Los Angeles to New York by 2017, a feat that still hasn’t happened. In 2017 he said people would be able to safely sleep in their fully autonomous Teslas in about two years. The future is now, but napping in the driver’s seat of a moving vehicle remains extremely dangerous.

In the past, Musk’s bold predictions have been met with A-for-effort enthusiasm and a smattering of polite skepticism. But the response this time has been different. People have less patience for PR campaigns masquerading as engineering timelines. “That’s bullshit,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a research analyst for Navigant, a consulting firm that ranks companies on the viability of their autonomous vehicle plans. “At best, they may be able to create a system that functions under certain limited scenarios. It will not be fully autonomous in 2020 or anytime in the next several years.”

What’s changed? Self-driving cars—and their associated building blocks such as machine learning, computer vision, and LIDAR—continue to improve, but executives other than Musk have been admitting that reports of their impending deployment were greatly exaggerated. Ford CEO Jim Hackett said last month that the industry had “overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles.” Chris Urmson, the former leader of Google’s self-driving car project, once hoped that his son wouldn’t need a driver’s license because driverless cars would be so plentiful by 2020. Now the CEO of the self-driving startup Aurora, Urmson says that driverless cars will be slowly integrated onto our roads “over the next 30 to 50 years.” That’s nearly as long as it took computers to evolve from IBM’s first mainframe to Apple’s first iPhone.

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It is imperative that we focus on making human driven cars and other forms of transportation safer and more accessible, rather than relying on an autonomous dream that is still decades away from practicality.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. I will have you know that the driverless car will be the number one issue in the 2016 election. Nt

[FrodosNewPet]

4. Hopefully, sane regulation becomes an issue in the 2020 election.

Congress needs to step up instead of punting to the developers and manufacturers to be self regulating.

[Glassunion]

2. I don't think the market is focusing on "driverless" cars.

We just aren’t there. It’s a tough pill for a lot of folks to swallow. We didn’t go from horses to trains to automobiles overnight. We won’t go from where we are to fully autonomous cars overnight either.

Truth is, they are safer. However they are so limited in full capabilities, the human is just so much more capable in the unknowns. Someday we will be there. But in the meantime we will see autonomous capabilities slowly work their way into our environment. Self braking, lane awareness, adaptive cruise control, etc... it’ll come (and hopefully be regulated) piecemeal.

[FrodosNewPet]

3. Agreed

Technology, used in a way that makes human drivers more aware instead of trying to replace that awareness, would go a LONG way to making transportation safer. The flexibility of human object recognition, human judgement, and old-fashioned self preservation motivation makes us better decision makers.

[Bradical79]

5. Laws and regulations have to be figured out

And further testing, including larger scale test markets, would make this a pretty slow process regardless of the underlying tech being up to snuff.

[Totally Tunsie]

6. Driverless shuttle buses have just debuted in Providence.

https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190514/state-leaders-get-first-ride-on-providence-self-driving-shuttle-service

https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/providence/self-driving-shuttles-set-to-hit-the-road-in-providence/2001011552

A fleet of six "Little Roady" autonomous transport shuttles will go into service on Wednesday, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) announced Tuesday.

The shuttles function like any other vehicle - stopping at lights, waiting at crosswalks, and breaking for any unexpected hazards such as jaywalkers. They have 30 different sensors, radars and cameras that allow them to see a full 360 degrees.

The free, experimental service will operate seven days a week with 12 stops between Providence Station and Olneyville Square. RIDOT Director Peter Alviti said those five miles represent the longest public transit route for self-driving vehicles in the country.
<snip>
The vehicles, provided by Michigan-based May Mobility, underwent 500 miles of safety testing in Providence and North Kingstown prior to being put online.

They can accommodate up to five passengers along with a "fleet attendant," who will assist new riders and be able to take over the shuttle's controls, if necessary.

[hunter]

7. Driven by people or robots, cars are vile.

I want to live in a world where most people don't need cars and wouldn't want to own one.

This planet simply can't support billions of automobiles, one for every adult.

In any case, it hurts just as bad to be hit by a car driven by a person as it does one driven by a robot.

[Xolodno]

8. They ARE on their way.

When is the question. I work at an insurance company, the industry knows auto insurance will decrease in revenue due to automated cars and less people driving. Its why they are creating technology driven products...even creating new companies to house them because of the perceived view of the old behemoth slow moving large company.

With that said...

The average age of a car on the road today is 11 years. So its going to take a decade before automated cars reach that average, even it they were released today. The technology is not in its infancy, but is on its way. Small scale tests have shown the reason why these cars get into accidents is not because of the technology....but because of the other human driver. And they are being tested in large cities. I saw one last Thursday, it had the message on the back "Please be patient, Artificial Intelligence testing car" on the back. I passed it because it was doing the speed limit.