Driver Retirement

6/9/23

Driver Retirement

No steering wheel: The best way to build user confidence? [Source]

Driverless tech sounded like it would eat the world a few years ago, but now autonomous vehicles seem to be something most have concluded is still a long way off.

If you’re like me, you started hearing about self-driving cars around a decade ago, when everyone was giddy with anticipation. Finally, we could stop hanging onto the steering wheel for boring long commutes, and instead relax while watching videos and updating our social media pages as the car drove itself. Ever so subtly, this vision faded into the background as another technological dream postponed indefinitely.

At the time, automakers were crowding into research consortiums to make the technology work, along with the Silicon Valley tech companies with piles of cash to plough into the effort. The moment when I decided that self-driving would arrive soon was when Google (before it became Alphabet) announced it was joining the fray. Then, after a few years, Google retreated, saying it was too difficult a problem to solve on any reasonable schedule. Waymo is what remains of the discarded enterprise.

There are only two companies still developing driverless tech: Waymo and GM-backed Cruise. As Timothy B Lee reports, the two have been using the technology in a couple cities for increasing mileage. More promisingly, both plan to earn income in the near future, even if still without profit:

Earlier this month, Waymo announced it was doubling the size of its Phoenix taxi service to 180 square miles. Waymo also offers driverless rides to a hand-picked group of passengers in San Francisco. And last October, Waymo announced it was preparing to expand to Los Angeles. Overall, the company is aiming to grow the business 10-fold—from 10,000 to 100,000 weekly trips—by the summer of 2024.

For its part, Cruise operates a driverless commercial taxi service in a portion of San Francisco during the overnight hours. Cruise has begun testing a driverless taxi service that operates 24/7 across the city of San Francisco and is now awaiting regulatory approval to open it to paying customers. In the Phoenix area, a small number of driverless Cruise vehicles are providing both taxi rides and Walmart grocery deliveries. Cruise also runs a small driverless taxi service for paying customers in Austin.

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Observers describe a pattern to new technology. First comes media hype, with overwrought hopes and fears. Next comes the dawning realization that the tech is still needs a lot of development. Meanwhile, in the background, elements of the technology are implemented in wide-ranging fields where they are refined and improved in myriad ways as developers learn more. Eventually, the tech becomes infused throughout society without anyone much noticing. Emeritus MIT engineering professor Rodney Brooks spoke to Russ Roberts about this regarding self-driving cars on EconTalk in September of 2018.

As Lee explains in his article, the two driverless enterprises have made their services quite good at this point. The rides are smoother and quicker, even if they limit their risks of accident by choosing slower routes and off-peak travel times. The sensors are better, and their programming for handling human interactions is much more competent.

Waymo and Cruise have gone to great lengths to avoid any possible deaths like that in 2018 of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, AZ, who was struck and killed by a driverless Uber while walking her bike across the road late at night. In that case, there was a safety driver on board who had become lulled into the belief that there was no possible danger on nearly empty roadways.

Lee is hopeful that the technology is getting better, and getting better faster. The companies have plans to earn money while learning more about making the tech work. (He mentions Tesla with its inappropriately named “Full Self-Driving” software package as having an entirely different model that does not compare to what Cruise and Waymo are cautiously developing.)

For his part, Brooks recently tried taking Cruise cabs in San Fransisco; he was impressed with the progress. Yet he also detected their shortcomings, and he remained generally skeptical that driverless tech will result in fleets of driverless taxis anytime soon:

BUT, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that an MVP [minimal viable product] means that mass adoption is just around the corner. We have a ways to go yet, and mass adoption might not be in the form of one-for-one replacement of human driving that has driven this dream for the last decade or more.