Communications of the ACM
Driverless Cars Go Humble to Get Real
Following a period of funk that included a pandemic-related freeze on road tests, driverless car developments have been coming thick and fast.
Credit: Burton Booz
The dream of computer-driven cars taking over the roads remains a fantasy. But slowly, and maybe more modestly than tech idealists imagined, driverless vehicles are getting real.
After a period of funk that included a pandemic-related freeze on road tests, driverless car developments have been coming thick and fast in the last few weeks.
Waymo, which is part of the same company as Google, recently expanded its driverless taxi service in Phoenix — and without a person in the driver's seat in case something goes wrong. General Motors' driverless car company will also soon remove human minders from its self-driving test cars in San Francisco. Tesla has said it will soon turn on software features that shift many of its cars on the road into driverless test vehicles.
For now, driverless cars operate in isolated cases. It will be many years before they are reliable, affordable and widespread in all road and weather conditions. And I continue to worry that optimism about driverless cars will make people and policymakers avoid hard choices on inefficient and road clogging transportation and hold out instead for computer-piloted vehicles to solve everything — which they won't.
From The New York Times
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