Where is the driverless car? Half a decade ago, manufacturers, many researchers, consultancies and media (including de Volkskrant) it’s almost certain: around this time it’s driving around. Our lives would change: the robot car takes our children to football, city centers turn into herb gardens because parking spaces become redundant, accidents decrease because the independent car does not drink alcohol and is still razor sharp after a long working day.
So: where is it?
Motorists are still stuck with cars that can barely keep themselves between the road markings. In the United States, the robot car is already slowly driving in designated enclaves, but the cities there are a lot easier to drive because there are hardly any cyclists and the roads are straight. In a city like Naples or Rotterdam he is nowhere to be seen.
As late as 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk ‘certainly’ predicted a million robot taxis in 2020. In the meantime, some expectation management has taken place in the boardrooms of major car manufacturers: the fully self-driving car may never come. Even companies that have specialized in it now seem convinced. “Why would you want that?” Kyle Vogt wonders when Reuters asks him. Vogt is the boss at Cruise, the General Motors division that deals with autonomously driving vehicles. He envisions a world in which robot cars can largely cope on their own (at least in the United States), but with a fleet of human drivers as backup, who can watch from a distance and intervene if things go wrong.
Musk still thinks its self-driving Teslas will be there “this year,” but the car company declined to comment when it was asked again about the state of affairs.
At the same time, there is a rush. Manufacturers and investors have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars in the technology and will not be willing to do so for very long. As the chief of research firm Edge Case Research told the news agency, “If they don’t achieve their goal in the next two years, they won’t exist anymore.”