The self-driving car is just around the corner

I was musing about self-driving cars In August 2021, comparing them to the ever-elusive concept of flying cars. One year later, despite repeated promises (Is that the recurrent pattern?), we still don't have self-driving cars.

Maybe they’re still coming to a driveway near you? This week, Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, a unit of General Motors, suggested that there will always be a remote driver available to provide assistance.

That's a sound of defeat.

Another self-driving car prophet, Mr. Musk of Tesla mentioned that building a self-driving car is far harder than he imagined. And that is coming from a guy who runs a company building spaceships. (As a bonus, Tesla is getting sued by their customers for the use of the term 'Full Self-Driving' and their promise that the cars would be soon driving completely on their own. The moving target is now set for 2023.)

Driving is so boring and repetitive with many written rules. Yet at the same time, it is so unpredictable that any current technology just can't help us. Add to it a question: Where is the demand for self-driving coming from?

Do you remember Uber competing with Google's Waymo about who was going to build a self-driving car first? It was the way of the future, where the biggest cab company (still claiming that they are not a cab company) would eventually replace all their drivers with autonomous cars. That was until the moment Uber realized that it would run out of money much sooner and ditched the whole thing. You don't hear Uber talking about self-driving cars these days.

At least GM is more honest about the scale of the problem than the other automakers and it is trying to (re)set the expectations. The biggest nightmare from the GM's announcement is for parents of teenagers playing games like Grand Theft Auto. These kids had the foresight, unlike their parents, to learn how to drive cars remotely. GM won't have any problem recruiting workers to the self-driving support center, which won't even have a physical location. Everybody is going to work from home anyway. And based on the progress so far, it will be a job for life for them.

As mentioned in my previous post, the investment in self-driving cars brought us many advancements in technology. For example, we have Lidar, as well as new advanced chips with video capture, image recognition and neural networks built-in. These technologies will have uses in other applications.

Maybe it is time to recognize that self-driving cars are a problem which no single company can solve on their own. This is a problem for the whole industry to solve it together, in a collaborative manner.

The recurrent pattern here? A year from now, I will be writing another post about how close the automakers are to having self-driving cars almost ready for production.