Are self-driving cars still an impossible dream?

For years, we’ve been told that self-driving cars are just around the corner. But it’s time to accept the truth, said Darrell Etherington on TechCrunch: they “aren’t going to happen” in our lifetimes.

I’ve long been excited about the potential of this technology, but my remaining optimism finally left me last month when Ford and Volkswagen announced they were winding up Argo AI, their autonomous driving-tech joint venture. Argo was considered a leader in the field. But Ford feels that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off”, and it could no longer stomach the spiralling costs.

This is just the latest setback. True, Google spinoff Waymo and GM’s Cruise are still making progress in trialling driverless vehicles on the roads, but these are on a small scale. Tesla is pushing ahead with its self-driving technology, but its ambitions may be curbed by a criminal inquiry that is looking into more than a dozen accidents involving its “Autopilot” system.

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“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 start-up developing autonomous dump trucks for use at mining sites, because he thinks “that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicles will be able to handle”. State-of-the-art robot cars still “struggle” with construction sites, animals, traffic cones, pedestrian crossings, and sometimes even simple left turns.

Don’t underestimate the incredible technological advances that have been made, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. I recently took a ride in a self-driving taxi operated by Waymo in the city of Chandler, Arizona, and was left in awe.

There’s 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 flawless, I soon relaxed. “It slowed when other vehicles behaved erratically, and merged with the polite delicacy of a Victorian aunt.” It was so soothing that I got caught up in texting a colleague “and absent-mindedly started to ask the driver how much longer it would be until we got to the restaurant”.

Granted, the taxi was foxed at one point when a truck stopped in front of us and wanted to reverse in order to take a missed turning. Unclear about what to do next, the car “chirped that it was calling a human specialist to resolve the situation”. Fortunately, the truck decided to drive on instead and we proceeded on our way. There’s a reason Waymo is operating in Chandler, “with its wide, straight roads” and predictable sunny weather, but my driverless experience made me believe this “amazing” technology remains worth pursuing