If it feels like self-driving cars have been a mainstay of the media hype-cycle for years on end with very little to show for it, well, you’d be right: Elon Musk – among others – has been bandying around Stalinist timelines for when his likely exhausted Tesla engineers will launch the revolutionary technology for over a decade to no avail. But what exactly went wrong, and will we ever see self-driving cars on Aussie roads?
Self-driving cars have been a mainstay of the modern media cycle for years now, with the ever-exciting stories of their imminent arrival keeping tech fans on the edge of their seats, and the slightly less fortunate developments – such as driverless cars going rogue or Ford’s despotic designs – providing endless amusement for the cynics.
Love them or hate them, driverless cars will – we hope – eventually become a pervasive day-to-day reality, providing the opportunity for safer, more efficient travel and an unprecedented amount of reclaimed free time for commuters everywhere.
However, despite promises from some of tech’s industry leaders and supposedly biggest brains, the utopian driverless future is yet to come to fruition. Here, we look back on some of the wildest claims, unforeseen obstacles, and adjusted expectations of when the future may finally arrive…
Back in 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a live interview at Stanford’s FutureFest, describing how he felt the evolution of driverless AI was progressing and – in a statement that doesn’t read too well eight years down the line – sets out his timeline for driverless technology to be ready for rollout.
Speaking to Fortune’s Krsiten Korosec, Musk said: “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
Musk fans – of which there are always a surprising amount – will leap to his defence and say that this is just to get the technology prepped, not for a full commercial rollout. This is fair enough, but Musk went on to add in the same conversation that he predicted a full rollout to be complete within one to five years after that technological development, depending on the region.
So, even if we took Musk’s prediction at its longest parameters – two years plus five years – that means we still should have had full rollout by the end of last year. Here we are in March 2023, and I’m still having to drive myself to work everyday likes its 1965.
So, where did it all go wrong? According to Neil Sipe, Honorary professor of Planning at Queensland University, fully autonomous vehicles are estimated to be 80% developed. However, as is so often the case, its the remaining 20% that proves the most challenging, with rare and unpredictable events such as extreme weather, unexpected wildlife crossings, and unscheduled roadworks proving hard for AI to handle.
The US National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently launched an investigation into the less-than-perfect autonomous ride-hailing services offered by Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco. The investigation cited moments where vehicles “may have engaged in inappropriately hard braking or became immobilised,” causing hazards to passengers and passersby alike.
Ongoing autonomous vehicle efforts largely fall into two groups: ride-hailing services and direct vehicle sales to the public. Cruise operates 100 robotaxis in San Francisco and plans to increase its fleet to 5,000. Meanwhile, Waymo provides autonomous ride-hailing services in Phoenix and San Francisco with plans to expand into Los Angeles. Uber has recently signed a deal with Motional to provide autonomous vehicles for its ride-hailing and delivery services.
Tesla, on the other hand, offers a full self-driving system as a $15,000 option on its newer vehicles but has failed to sell a single one of these in the US, with commercially viable AI in their cars topping out at emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and auto park assist, despite the company being world leaders in electric battery car sales.
To make matters worse, in February 2023 the NHTSA found that Tesla’s fully self-driving beta software actually increases the risk of a crash – remember, this mind-bending technology is supposed to be making the world safer, and I reckon the world’s well-supplied with bad driving skills as is – leading to the recall of 362,000 vehicles…
In addition, Ford and VW’s decision to stop funding autonomous driving technology company Argo AI resulted in its closure pretty shortly thereafter, with both companies shifting their focus from full-on driverless automation back to the more simplistic features mentioned above. It seems that confidence around driverless tech is going back in time, rather than rushing forwards…
So, we hate to break it to you, but it seems that fully driverless cars won’t be hitting Aussie roads – or any roads for that matter – anytime soon. That’s not to say that development has come to a halt, but things have seriously cooled off. In a statement earlier this month that won’t exactly fill you with optimism, Mercedes’ Chief Technology Officer Markus Schafer said that driverless cars by 2030 are “doable”…
As much as we admire the measured German realism, it’s a bad news day for commuters: keep those driving gloves by your side and settle in for another ten years of pedal to the metal.