Drivers were meant to be redundant by now. But as James O’Malley discovers, self-driving technology is quietly improving
Not so long ago it felt like we were on the cusp of a transport revolution, as the promise of autonomous vehicles took hold. “You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this,” said wildly optimistic Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2014, who after making his billions created the company’s X-Lab, which later spun out Waymo, to research autonomous technology.
And, of course, there was Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In 2015 he confidently predicted that within two years “full autonomy” would be achieved, and then a year later during a TED talk predicted that by the end of 2017, one of his company’s cars would be capable of driving across the United States without the driver once having to touch the steering wheel.
Look out of the window, however, and you’ll probably be there an awfully long time waiting for a self-driving car to pass by. The hyperbole has subsided and several major autonomy or autonomy-adjacent projects, such as Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group or Ford’s Chariot division, have been shuttered completely. “The problem is considerably harder than it was originally thought to be, and the business models might not make as much sense,” said Mahmood Hikmet, head of research and development at Ohmio, a New Zealand-based “intelligent transport” company.
You might have given up all hope of ever being driven around town by your own car. However, with a good deal more modesty than before, the technology has continued to slowly improve.
Cars on the road
Even though most of us don’t see self-driving cars passing by our front door, they are starting to creep on to public roads. Google’s Waymo robo-taxis are in routine operation on the streets of Tempe, Arizona. And earlier this summer, Cruise, a robo-taxi subsidiary of veteran car manufacturer General Motors, was granted permission to run its vehicles, fully autonomously, on the crowded and chaotic streets of San Francisco.
Yet even though these projects are starting to break cover, Hikmet remains sceptical of the robo-taxis that companies such as Waymo and Cruise are attempting to make a reality. “Unless you’ve got a big tech company backing you, it means that you can’t fulfil those business cases because there’s very little, if any, profit that could come
