Cars will eventually drive themselves. But it’s probably going to take longer than we hope.
Cars will eventually drive themselves. But it’s probably going to take longer than we hope.
Realists in the industry, such as Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota $TM Research Institute, have dumped some cold water on the expectations that truly autonomous vehicles are just around the corner. “All carmakers are aiming to achieve Level 5 autonomy [the highest level, in which cars can navigate under all conditions with no human intervention], ” he said. “I need to make it perfectly clear….none of us in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true Level 5 autonomy. We are not even close.”
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Perhaps no technology has existed this long in the public imagination without actually existing in the real world, notes Marcel Maron, a PhD candidate in city planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “There wasn’t a 20-year lead up to the iPhone,” he says.
But that’s the self-driving situation today. First popularized in the early 20th century, self-driving cars have long been “just over the horizon.” Yet figuring out how to get a car to drive itself safely has proven to be among the most challenging problems for engineers and computer scientists. Silicon Valley is only just beginning to learn how extraordinarily difficult it is.
“Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation,” said Dan Ammann, the CEO of GM’s self-driving unit Cruise, in May.
Quartz pulled together the most significant milestones and predictions about AVs (automated vehicles), which have confounded optimistic executives and politicians for a century. It shows AVs passing through successive hype cycles throughout the 20th century, with hopes rising every few decades, only to be dashed a few years later. Despite passing through the latest “trough of disillusionment,” this time computers and sensors are theoretically capable of autonomy outside the lab. They’re being installed in millions of cars by major automakers. The challenge now will be refinement, affordability, regulation, and adoption.
Here’s the history (and predicted future) of AVs. It’s adapted from Bloomberg Philanthropies (pdf), Dan Sperling’s book Three Revolutions, and interviews with industry insiders and researchers.
