![]() ![]() Take Google’s sister company Waymo, the industry leader in self-driving cars. ![]() Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty ImagesĪnd even the simple parts of driving - like tracking the objects around a car on the road - are actually much trickier than they sound. John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, presents a self-driving car at Wed Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 7, 2017. Following a list of rules of the road isn’t enough to drive as well as a human does, because we do things like make eye contact with others to confirm who has the right of way, react to weather conditions, and otherwise make judgment calls that are difficult to encode in hard-and-fast rules. Driving is one of the more complicated activities humans routinely do. This simple description elides a whole lot of complexity. Teach in-car computers the rules of the road and set them loose to navigate to their own destination. The idea behind it is really simple: Outfit a car with cameras that can track all the objects around it and have the car react if it’s about to steer into one. 1) How exactly do self-driving cars work?Įngineers have been attempting prototypes of self-driving cars for decades. What happened? Here are nine questions you might have had about this long-promised technology, and why the future we were promised still hasn’t arrived. You can buy a car that will automatically brake for you when it anticipates a collision, or one that helps keep you in your lane, or even a Tesla Model S (which - disclosure - my partner and I own) whose Autopilot mostly handles highway driving.īut almost every one of the above predictions has been rolled back as the engineering teams at those companies struggle to make self-driving cars work properly. Elon Musk forecast that Tesla would do it by 2018 - and then, when that failed, by 2020.īut the year is here - and the self-driving cars aren’t.ĭespite extraordinary efforts from many of the leading names in tech and in automaking, fully autonomous cars are still out of reach except in special trial programs. Those declarations were accompanied by announcements from General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Toyota, and Honda that they’d be making self-driving cars by 2020. ![]() “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020,” blared a Business Insider headline from 2016. In 2020, you’ll be a “permanent backseat driver,” the Guardian predicted in 2015. When it comes to self-driving cars, the future was supposed to be now. ![]()
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