'Peak hype': why the driverless car revolution has stalled

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'Peak hype': why the driverless car revolution has stalled

As Uber parks its plans for robotaxis, experts admit the autonomous vehicle challenge is bigger than anticipated

 

From left: a Cruise self-driving car; a woman reads inside an autonomous Volvo; a Waymo driverless vehicle. Composite: Reuters/Volvo/Getty/AP

 

By 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britain’s motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London.

 

1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of 2020 Uber, one of the biggest players and supposed beneficiaries, decided to park its plans for self-driving taxis, selling off its autonomous division to Aurora in a deal worth about $4bn (£3bn) – roughly half what it was valued at in 2019.

 

The decision did not, Uber’s chief executive protested, mean the company no longer believed in self-driving vehicles. “Few technologies hold as much promise to improve people’s lives with safe, accessible, and environmentally friendly transportation,” Dara Khosrowshahi said. But more people might now take that promise with a pinch of salt.

 

Uber dashcam footage shows lead up to fatal self-driving crash – video

 

Prof Nick Reed, a transport consultant who ran UK self-driving trials, says: “The perspectives have changed since 2015, when it was probably peak hype. Reality is setting in about the challenges and complexity.”

 

Automated driving, says Reed, could still happen in the next five years on highways with clearly marked lanes, limited to motorised vehicles all going in the same direction. Widespread use in cities remains some way further out, he says: “But the benefits are still there.”

 

The most touted benefit is safety, with human error blamed for more than 90% of road accidents. Proponents also say autonomous cars would be more efficient and reduce congestion.

 

Looking back, Reed says “the technology worked … people had the sense, it does the right thing most of the time, we are 90% of the way there. But it is that last bit which is the toughest. Being able reliably to do the right thing every single time, whether it’s raining, snowing, fog, is a bigger challenge than anticipated.”

 

Waymo, the Google spin-off that has led the field, could be a case in point: having quickly wowed the world with footage of self-driving cars, the subsequent steps have appeared small.

 

In October last year it announced the public could now hail fully driverless taxis, “in the near term” without a safety driver in any car – although the range remains limited to the sunny suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, whose every centimetre has been mapped by Waymo computers.

 

Elsewhere, robotaxis have stalled. Like Uber, the cab firm Addison Lee had staked out bold ambitions, signing up with the UK autonomy pioneer Oxbotica in 2018 to get robotaxis into London by 2021.

 

That deal was quietly dropped in March last year, under new ownership. Addison Lee’s chief executive, Liam Griffin, said: “Driverless cars are best left to the OEMs [manufacturers], and don’t form part of our current plans.”

 

The launch of an autonomous taxi service by Ford has also been postponed at least a year to 2022 because of the pandemic.

“Globally, Covid-19 has delayed trials and launches of connected and automated vehicles,” says Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Regulatory changes could still allow developments such as Automated Lane Keeping Systems being rolled out in 2021 across everyday cars.

“ALKS is the first version of automated driving technology which could prevent some 47,000 serious accidents over the next decade, while creating up to 420,000 new jobs,” Hawes said.

 

The system could let the car take control on UK motorways thisyear – although insurers are trying to talk the government out of giving the go-ahead.

 

Alexandra Smyth, who leads on autonomous systems at the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “There’s lots of progress and interesting developments with regulations and codes of practice – all important components that sit alongside the technology itself. But realistically there are still going to be errors and things that don’t perform as we hoped. Public trust will be one of the major hurdles.”

 

Fears were stoked after Uber’s self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. And despite Elon Musk’s continuing bold claims for Tesla, and reports that Apple is still secretly pushing to develop a personal autonomous vehicle by 2024, the law is unlikely to permit drivers to relinquish the wheel soon.

 

According to Christian Wolmar, the author of Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere?, problems such as social acceptance, cybersecurity and cost have never been addressed.

 

He says: “People do not want to replace the car outside the front door with an app it’s just not a viable concept. I think more and more people are sceptical of the model that we’ll all be in robocars soon. Instead, the industry is now talking about specific uses.”

 

If Oxbotica’s Paul Newman, one of the Oxford University professors pioneering Britain’s autonomous industry, has any doubts over the long term, he is not showing it – although he says the level of autonomy where “occasionally there might be a remote assist” is a far more achievable ambition than a world where the machines can entirely get on with it.

 

Oxbotica is running a fleet of autonomous Ford Mondeos on public roads in a trial in Oxford – but the technological progress, he says, is not about robotaxis: “It’s purely about the software, it’s agnostic about the vehicles.”

 

The driverless car world, he says, is “a great moonshot”: cars are a huge market but also the hardest to transform, long after autonomous mining or rail or shuttle services are in place.

 

Newman compares the progress with mobiles phones, recalling the first he saw, wielded by Danny Glover in the 1987 film Lethal Weapon, which was the size of a small suitcase.

“Is a future of driverless cars coming? Assuredly as mobile phones. This is the normal cycle that technology goes through. We’re still moving along that graph,” he said.

“We’ve gone through the flashy stage, when we’ve said it’s six months away … Now we’ve got engineers saying this is properly hard.”

 

 

Source: 'Peak hype': why the driverless car revolution has stalled

[mood]

Waymo CEO: Building safe driverless cars is harder than rocket science

Company raised $3.2 billion last year, but CEO says the challenge remains huge

 

Enlarge

 

Last year was the most significant yet in Waymo’s 11-year effort to develop a driverless car.

 

The Google sister company raised $3.2 billion, signed deals with several partners, and launched the world’s first truly driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Even so, the widespread rollout of fully autonomous vehicles remains slow, staggered, and costly.

“It’s an extraordinary grind,” said John Krafcik, Waymo chief executive, in an interview with the Financial Times. “I would say it’s a bigger challenge than launching a rocket and putting it in orbit around the Earth... because it has to be done safely over and over and over again.”

Gone is the optimism of just a couple of years ago. In March 2018, Waymo confidently forecast that “up to 20,000” electric Jaguars “will be built in the first two years of production and be available for riders of Waymo’s driverless service, serving a potential 1 million trips per day.”

 

Two months later, it added that “up to 62,000” Chrysler minivans would join its driverless fleet, “starting in late 2018.”

 

Today, there is little sign that any of these vehicles have been ordered, and Waymo’s official fleet size remains just 600.

 

Mr. Krafcik, a carmaking expert who coined the term “lean production” in the 1980s and rose to be chief executive of Hyundai America, acknowledged that he and his colleagues had relied on their experience in the car industry to judge how fast Waymo’s growth would be.

“When we thought, in 2015, that we would have a broadly available service by 2020, it wasn’t a crazy thought,” he said. The thinking was: “Well, if we’ve got one prototype, then we can get to mass production in just a couple of years, right?

“This was a position of—I wouldn’t say ignorance—but a lack of information and a lack of experience... We’ve become very humble over these last five years.”

Some history

Waymo, which started as a Google project in 2009, first demonstrated its driverless technology publicly in 2015, spawning a whole new industry that generated all kinds of hype.

 

Uber began spending $20 million a month to try to build its own driverless cars, fearing the collapse of its business model. Its goal was to have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road by 2020.

“This war for self-driving is truly existential for Uber,” its chief product officer warned then-chief executive Travis Kalanick in May 2016. “Either we’ll start up our second S curve of growth or we’ll die.”

But it took Waymo two more years to operate three fully driverless cars at the same time, then another year to have 100. One more year of testing gave Waymo the comfort to begin ferrying select passengers in its test vehicles in Phoenix. Then, three months ago, it opened the network to the public.

Slow down

This markedly slower timeline is unlikely to be bested, said Mr. Krafcik. Turning again to a space analogy, he said it took the Soviet Union and the United States about 10 years to launch a rocket into orbit. To get around the Moon, it was another 10 years. “No one beat that time,” he said. “It’s just the time it takes to do something of that scope and magnitude.”

 

With the exception of Tesla, which continues to promise the imminent arrival of self-driving technology, a slower timeline has been widely accepted. In 2018, the consultancy Bain said a robot taxi, or “robotaxi,” transformation was “just around the corner” and forecast autonomous vehicles would account for up to 30 percent of the market by 2030. Now it expects the figure to be 4-9 percent.

“We are at a point now where there is more realism than hype,” said Mark Gottfredson, a Bain partner.

Waymo, with its deep pockets and a team of 2,100 employees, remains in the lead. Uber, meanwhile, abandoned its project last month, in effect giving away its entire driverless division to rival Aurora, along with a $400 million investment, in return for a 26 percent stake and a board seat.

“Buses, trucks, cars, whatever”

But some of Waymo’s rivals are making headway. Zoox and GM-backed Cruise have both unveiled purpose-built vehicles that, without a steering wheel or pedals, appear far more futuristic than the “soccer mom” Chrysler Pacificas used by Waymo.

 

Zoox executives have described their vehicle as being like the first iPhone—a revolutionary device because the hardware and software were integrated from the ground up.

 

But Mr. Krafcik points out that Waymo had already tried to build a customized vehicle with the Firefly, a fully automated two-seater designed in 2013 and abandoned four years later.

 

That experience taught Waymo that its exclusive focus should be on the Driver, an Android-like operating system that it wants to operate in several different types of vehicle.

“We aspire to drive anything that moves on public roads—buses, trucks, cars, whatever,” said Mr. Krafcik. “We don’t want to be tied to a single form factor.”

 

Such an approach could potentially earn Waymo multiple lines of revenue from ride-hailing services, goods delivery, and licensing deals. Partners appear eager. Last year alone, Waymo struck deals to build driverless ride-hailing vehicles with Volvo, cargo vans with Fiat Chrysler, and articulated lorries with Daimler.

 

Some observers have seen this as a pivot away from robotaxis, which may be costly to roll out at scale, but Mr. Krafcik argued such conclusions tend to be based on false assumptions. “I read all the time that the hardware associated with the Waymo Driver is $250,000—and that’s wrong, just completely wrong. It's not even close.”

Billions of dollars

He declined to go into operating costs, but balked at the skepticism over fully autonomous vehicles and recommended that anyone with doubts simply take a look at Waymo’s investors—including the venture capital groups Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, the institutional investors T. Rowe Price and Fidelity, and the car groups Magna and AutoNation.

“We don’t talk too much about our $3.2 billion raise but that was the single largest capital raise for a pre-revenue company in the history of the universe,” he said. “They’ve obviously got a lot of confidence in the sort of economics the Waymo Driver can unlock.”

 

Mr. Krafcik did not say when and where its ride-sharing service will launch next. Waymo’s conspicuous vehicles can be seen daily in San Francisco, even at Christmas, but removing the driver and letting tourists in could still be years away. If so, Mr. Krafcik seemed unperturbed, knowing well that in a few decades it will matter little which precise year ended up being the turning point.

 

Long-term, he remained adamant the technology will disrupt personal car ownership and had no hesitation forecasting that children born today will have little reason to learn how to drive.

“[They] absolutely will not need a driver’s license—I can say that with 100 percent confidence,” he said. “[They’ll] be able use Waymo in just about any place that [they] might be.”

 

 

Source: Waymo CEO: Building safe driverless cars is harder than rocket science