The “death of self-driving cars” has been greatly exaggerated

Enlarge / The latest iteration of Waymo’s self-driving technology is based on the Jaguar I-PACE. (credit: Waymo)

Seven years ago, hype about self-driving cars was off the charts. It wasn’t just Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who has been making outlandish predictions about self-driving technology since 2015. In 2016, Ford set a goal to start selling cars without steering wheels by 2021. The same year, Lyft predicted that a majority of rides on its network would be autonomous by 2021.

None of that happened. Instead, the last few years have seen brutal consolidation. Uber sold off its self-driving project in 2020, and Lyft shut down its effort in 2021. Then, last October, Ford and Volkswagen announced they were shutting down their self-driving joint venture called Argo AI.

Today, a lot of people view self-driving technology as an expensive failure whose moment has passed. The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Mims argued in 2021 that self-driving cars “could be decades away.” Last year, Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin declared that “self-driving cars are going nowhere.”

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Author: Timothy B. Lee. [Source Link (*), Ars Technica – All content]

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