Autonomous cars: Death of a dream?
It’s time to admit that omnipresent, fully self-driving cars aren’t going to happen in our lifetime, said Darrell Etherington in TechCrunch. Any remaining optimism about our self-driving prospects finally left me earlier this month when Ford announced it was winding down Argo AI, the autonomous driving–tech company it had backed. Argo was “considered a leader with solid technological fundamentals.” But Ford could no longer stomach the extraordinary costs. Sure, Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise are doing amazing things, but they are “extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours.” Tesla is also pushing ahead with its Full Self-Driving technology, but a criminal investigation could seriously curb its ambitions. And then there’s the biggest hurdle: Will people trust computer-driven autos?
“Some of the most fervent believers” in self-driving technology “have turned apostate,” said Max Chafkin in Bloomberg Businessweek. Anthony Levandowski, the former superstar Google engineer convicted of stealing self-driving secrets and taking them to Uber, is now running a startup developing autonomous dump trucks for use at mining sites because “that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicles will be able to handle.” State-ofthe-art robot cars still “struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards,” and even simple left turns.
Tesla’s technology is on more roads than you think, said Cade Metz in The New York Times. For more than two years, it has enlisted beta testers like Chuck Cook to experiment with Full Self-Driving, which Tesla “is constantly modifying.” One challenging scenario has been a left turn near his home in Jacksonville, Fla., that requires the car to cross three lanes of traffic and stop within a median before merging into more traffic. “Sometimes, the car made the turn with aplomb,” but too often it stopped in the median with “its rear bumper jutting into oncoming traffic.” After seeing Cook’s videos of this, Tesla updated its software to better recognize “a safe zone” in the median. But that’s just one scenario “among the endless scenarios a Tesla might face” on the road.
Still, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post, let’s take stock of how far we’ve come. I recently took a self-driven Waymo in Chandler, Ariz., and was left in awe. “There is an undeniable horror-movie aspect to sitting in the back of a car and watching the steering wheel turn of its own accord.” But the car’s ultra-cautious driving style was so soothing and flawless, “I got bored enough to let my phone distract me.” There’s a reason Waymo is operating in Chandler, “with its wide, straight roads” and predictable weather, but my driverless experience made me believe this “amazing” technology remains worth pursuing.