Self-Driving Cars

Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

Ford and other companies say the industry overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles, which still struggle to anticipate what other drivers and pedestrians will do.

In 2018, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road by 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars.

Most of those cars have yet to arrive and it is likely to be years before they do. Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than first thought.

In the most recent sign of the scramble to regroup, Ford and Volkswagen were teaming up to tackle the self-driving challenge. Both manufactures are predominately testing cars in Pittsburgh and Miami. A year ago, many industry executives exuded much greater certainty. They thought that their engineers had solved the most vexing technical problems and self-driving cars would be shuttling people around town in at least several cities by 2020.

“There was this incredible optimism,” Companies thought this was a very straightforward problem. You just throw in some sensors and artificial intelligence, and it would be easy to do.

The industry’s confidence was quickly dented when a self-driving car being tested hit and killed a woman walking a bicycle across a street last year Since that fatality, “almost everybody has reset their expectations,

For the last five years, all in the car world has talked about well, apart from electrification is autonomous driving. Carmakers began dropping the terms “self-driving” and “mobility” at car shows. Meanwhile, visionary urban planners began rethinking city designs to envision what was sure to be a future uncluttered by automotive detritus — no more traffic signs or stoplights, no more cars parked by the side of the road.

In fact, the world was so optimistic about this future that we’d have fully autonomous cars everywhere by 2021. Flash forward to today, and precious little has changed about our daily driving. You probably hear a lot less about self-driving cars than you did a few years ago, and the prospect of safely dozing off behind the wheel on long drives remains a distant fantasy.

There are a lot of problems to solve that are conspiring to delay the arrival of the technology in fact, answers to these problems may redefine how self-driving cars will work from programming vehicles to follow the rules of the road to getting them to communicate with human drivers and pedestrians.

Those early estimates with really aggressive timelines for rolling out the services have turned into having a few research vehicles on the road by 2020, the reality is that while roads themselves are generally orderly and well-known environments, what actually happens on them is anything but. Humans are proficient behind the wheel, but they’re also imprecise and occasionally wayward. Until 100 percent of the vehicles on the road are fully autonomous something many analysts think is actually highly unlikely.

Finally, at the risk of further muddying the waters about when and what we can expect, there’s another variable that’s slowing down self-driving cars: Covid-19. Many carmakers are yet again recalibrating their expectations and timelines for the vehicles, noting that consumer behaviour might change permanently as a result of the pandemic and that could mean both a reluctance to use shared-car services. The pandemic might also spur increased interest in contactless delivery.

Plenty of other technologies for autonomous systems are already appearing in full-sized production vehicles, as well, in the guise of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), such as adaptive cruise control, traffic signal alerts, and emergency braking and manoeuvring. These will ease the consumer into accepting and using them over time while the development of technology for the fully evolved systems continues in the background. 

The path to autonomy truly does appear to be starting out small, working up to something much larger and more impactful as all the pieces fall into place. As companies switch into survival mode, noncritical expenses will be cut ruthlessly. Even the best of the best are going to be feeling a lot of pressure right now and I believe autonomous is inevitable which I do this would be a good play.