TOUGH MONTH FOR AUTONOMOUS CARS
It’s been a tough month for proponents of self-driving cars. First, Google blinked. In fact, it didn’t just blink, it all but threw in the towel. After all the media hype about Silicon Valley beating Detroit to the punch and software designers shaming traditional automotive engineers with their ingenuity, it now looks unlikely, says TheInformation.com’s Amir Efrati, that we will ever get to drive — or, more accurately, be driven in — a Google-badged car.
The official message is that parent company Alphabet has spun off Google’s self-driving research division into a new division called Waymo. As promising as that sounds, the real story is that it seems to have back-burnered its ambition to develop its own car. Google — sorry, Waymo — will still be developing self-driving hardware and software. One example is in FCA’s experimental self-driving Pacifica. But the hard truth of the matter is that there will be no cute little Koala autobots bearing Google badges. Not now. Not soon. Maybe not ever.
It was not supposed to be thus, with automakers supposedly being dinosaurs, relics of an industrial base long past its prime. Silicon Valley and its Game Boy geeks would quickly show how truly backward Detroit, Tokyo and Stuttgart really were. Or so went the hype. Go back and read Google headlines about the future of autonomous cars and you’ll probably find endless recitations dismissing traditional automakers’ ability to compete on an equal basis with the brainiacs from San Jose.
Unfortunately, the cost for a company like Google, used to fat profit margins generated by its relatively minuscule workforce, to develop its own automobile from scratch proved prohibitive. According to insiders, chief executive Larry Page simply wasn’t willing to commit the resources to such an enormous task with the tiny recompense common in the auto industry (despite the enormous gross revenues attributed to automakers, the car business remains pitifully lowmargin). Nor is Google the only tech giant to back off building automobiles itself. According to a New York Times report, Apple’s much ballyhooed Titan project is now in stasis, and even Uber, now the most megalomaniacal of Silicon Valley upstarts (and the one that most assiduously wants to put truck, cab and delivery drivers out of business) has hooked up with a resurgent Volvo. They may yet have great influence on the autonomous cars that still seem our future, but will not, it seems, be producing any cars themselves.
What does all this mean for the future of the self-driving car?
Well, with automakers back in the proverbial driver’s seat, I suspect we’ll see a slackening in the pace of development of autonomous driving, especially of the fully autonomous, no-steeringwheel-needed variety Google was so adamantly pushing. As much as all the automakers are trying to rebrand themselves as “mobility providers,” they’re still in the old-fashioned business of moving iron.
Having one fully autonomous ride-sharing vehicle — those classified Level V by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as able to perform “all driving tasks, under all conditions that a human driver could perform them” — replace multiple human-guided automobiles benefits no one in the business of manufacturing cars, internally combusting or otherwise.
Even if the development of autonomous cars continues apace, we’ll probably see fewer of the headlines predicting mass production of fully autonomous vehicles within the next decade. Tesla and Volvo aside, few automakers have confidence that the various technical, regulatory and consumer acceptance hurdles will be overcome as easily as Silicon Valley once so loudly proclaimed.
As Jim McBride, senior technical leader for Ford’s autonomous vehicles, recently pointed out to TheInformation.com, “The average lifetime of a car is 11 years. So I’d say it would take a couple of decades, starting in 2020” for the majority of cars on the road in the U.S to be fully autonomous. In other words, says the website, “at least 2040.”
Meanwhile, ever-prickly Uber is in trouble in California. On the very first day of its testing in San Francisco, one of its computer-controlled cars was spotted running a red light. It reportedly plowed through a pedestrian crosswalk some four seconds after the light turned red (thankfully, no one was injured). The California Department of Motor Vehicles had already been demanding that Uber stop its self-driving car tests in San Francisco until it had, like 20 other automakers, sought a “testing permit.” According to USA Today, California Vehicle Code licensing is to ensure that “those testing such a vehicle have provided an adequate level of financial responsibility, have adequately trained qualified test drivers on the safe operation of the autonomous technology; and will notify the DMV when the vehicles have been involved in a collision.”
Uber, at least at the time Driving went to press, is defying the order. The company says the driving infractions were the result of human error (all self-driving cars, even those testing fully autonomous systems, still require a driver behind the wheel). It claims, according to the Business Insider, that the self-driving Volvo’s automated driving system was not enabled at the time. More contentious, however, is Uber’s position that the “semi-autonomous” system it is testing in San Francisco is similar to driver-assistance systems commonly available in Teslas and other production cars without a special permit. Or as Anthony Levandowski, Uber’s vice-president of advanced technologies (and a defector from Google’s Chauffeur program) puts it, the regulation “doesn’t apply to us” because Uber’s self-driving system does not fit California’s definition of an autonomous vehicle. “You don’t need to get belts and suspenders or whatever else if you’re wearing a dress,” he said.
Unfortunately for Uber — and Levandowski’s colourful metaphor — California’s attorney general sees it differently, claiming it will “seek injunctive and other appropriate relief” if Uber does not apply for the permit. More importantly, public support for the ride-sharing giant’s aggressive posturing may be waning. John Simpson, privacy project director for Consumer Watchdog, said the powerful California advocacy group believes Uber’s activity “is a criminal offence under the Motor Vehicle Code, punishable with up to six months in jail” further adding that “(chief executive) Travis Kalanick should be arrested immediately.”
Like I said, it’s been a rough couple of months for self-driving cars.