The idea of a car that can magically whisk you around as you sit back, sipping a coffee or scrolling through your phone, is one to relish. Hell, everyone has thought about it at some point. And for nearly two decades now, powerhouses such as General Motors and Google have spent billions of dollars pursuing what everyone once thought was the pinnacle of driving technology: self-driving cars. Many promises were made, and consumers waited eagerly for automakers to usher in the new age of convenience and consumer safety (or so the thinking went), all thanks to fully autonomous vehicles.
Over a decade later, however, it’s a whole different story. The big players in this self-driving car game seem to have stalled, if not already given up on their ambitious plans. In 2022, Ford and Volkswagen decided to abort their self-driving project, Argo AI, with Ford alone sinking $2.7 billion. To some, this was a sign that building a successful autonomous car and turning a profit may not be feasible, at least not anytime soon.
From Bold Promises to Brutal Setbacks
Not too long ago, automakers and tech behemoths were essentially placing all of their bets on self-driving cars. GM promised that fully autonomous cars would be coming off the assembly line by 2019. Shortly after came Lyft with a little twist about how half of its rides would be driverless by 2021. Even Google wasn’t left behind. Chris Urmson, who worked at the company then, claimed that it might not be necessary for his son to learn how to drive. The excitement was infectious, to say the least. In fact, one industrial analyst even took things to the next level by claiming that robotaxis might become cheaper than walking. Crazy, but that just goes to show the enthusiasm clouding the air at the time. But it appears the real world had other ideas.
It’s one thing to build a car that can drive on a straight section of the highway. However, it’s something totally different to teach it to react in real time to edge cases, which can range from those unpredictable riders and cyclists you come across on the road to unplanned detours. “It’s really, really hard,” even the CEO of Waymo admitted it in 2018. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re really in there and trying to do things,” he added. These days, Waymo speaks in decades, not years. And even Tesla is no exception to the dying confidence, as its software is yet to live up to the promises made almost a decade ago.
When ‘Self-Driving’ Means Something Else
News reports and articles provide the impression that self-driving cars are imminent, which is one of the reasons why most people are overly optimistic about them. Companies have thrown around the terms ‘self-driving’ and ‘autonomous’ to denote less ambitious targets and still draw interest, even though that isn’t the case. According to Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot and a renowned roboticist, “the latest spin from Tesla is that of course the words in the name of the software, ‘Full Self Driving,’ could not possibly be interpreted to mean full self-driving.” And he may be right.
Real autonomy should handle just about everything. But if a company employee has to control the car remotely and can stop it at any time, then it’s not really autonomous now, is it? It’s also not true autonomy if the driver has to stay alert or else the car might mistake the moon for a traffic light. To expand on the definition further, it’s not autonomous if you can’t change the route mid-ride or stop it anywhere after a friend just called you to pick them up. Suffice it to say, the promised future of self-driving cars seems to be out of reach.