Driverless
cars, Aurora’s executives are urging their own industry to face a reality check, saying lofty promises risk confusing passengers and dooming the technology before it can truly take off.
The “entire industry” needs “to be more truthful about our capabilities,” said Sterling Anderson, an Aurora co-founder and former head of Tesla’s “Autopilot” system. “We’re talking about building trust in the public. You don’t do that by overstating what the system can and can’t do.”
A safe, sellable, self-driving car has become the holy grail of Silicon Valley: Converting even a fraction of the 3 trillion miles driven every year by American cars and trucks could reduce deadly accidents caused by human error and spawn a multibillion-dollar business.
Fifty-seven companies are authorized to test self-driving vehicles on California roads, state records show, and competition for talent, software and technologies has sparked an arms race even among traditional
automakers: Ford and GM have each invested roughly $1 billion into their own respective self-driving firms, Argo AI and Cruise.
The first company to market a true self-driving car could gain incredible cachet, winning buyer trust and marketing potential for which its rivals could only dream.
But industry experts suspect most will fail: The timeline is so uncertain. The development costs are so high. And the competition is so fierce, in the United States and around the world.
Tesla’s Elon Musk said in late September that his electric cars were only a software update away from being able to drive themselves on “autopilot” across the country — another attempt at the same pledge he made in 2016 and missed meeting last year.
But that spin has experts worried the industry is setting itself up for a fall after notable setbacks, including a crash in March during which a woman in Arizona was struck and killed by a selfdriving Uber. The company has suspended testing indefinitely; a backup driver in the car was looking at her phone at the time of the crash.
The crashes have contributed to public anxiety over the technology: More than 60 percent of Americans surveyed this summer in two polls by the Brookings Institution and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety said they were unwilling to set foot in a self-driving car. Believers in the technology’s potential to save lives worry that such early unease could lead drivers to shun the vehicles, delay their adoption or write them off for good.
Some in the industry argue such fears are misplaced, given that tens of thousands of Americans already die in car crashes every year. But Urmson says it’s reasonable for people to have concerns over a new and unproven technology when the marketing and the real-world capabilities appear so vastly mismatched.
“The status quo itself is broken. It’s not like we have safe transportation today on the roads,” he said. “But it’s important that we be as straightforward as possible about what you should expect, as someone using the technology, and what the limitations are. We can’t oversell.”
Early breakthroughs in selfdriving Systems engineer Prasad Venkiteswaran prepares a Volkswagen Golf equipped with self-driving technology for testing at Aurora Innovation in Pittsburgh.
technology, such as using car-mounted cameras and computers to keep the vehicle in its lane, spawned breathless media coverage and spurred industry marketers to suggest true autonomy was close at hand. Some of those features are now sold on car lots as a step closer to real self-driving, known as “driver-assistance” systems.
But self-driving engineers and designers are battling much thornier challenges, including how to dodge pedestrians, signal to other drivers, navigate obstacles and handle
rain, heat and snow. Earlier tasks were conquered by installing sensors, pouring in data or teaching the computers useful tricks. But the new hurdles demand a much more complicated form of intelligence — a mix of road awareness, physical sturdiness and human psychology, among other qualities — that could take years to research and understand.
Aurora has quickly become one of the industry’s most promising challengers, with a founding trio of veteran automation experts, including