How Long Before Cars Drive Themselves?

Raj Rajkumar, a self-driving vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon, warns that self-driving cars are being over-hyped. Despite promised by Ford, Nissan, and other companies, they are actually many years away.

Ford’s promise to have fleets of self-driving cars in cities by 2021 is deceptive, the critics say. “Dig into the statements and press for details,” says the Wall Street Journal, “and a Ford spokesman says that car will only be self-driving in the portion of major cities where the company can create and regularly update extremely detailed 3-D street maps.”

However, that is exactly what the Antiplanner said a few months ago. As the Antiplanner noted at the time, a company called Here has already mapped two-thirds of all paved roads in the United States, and updates its maps every day. It seems likely that all paved roads will be mapped by 2021.

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So why is a Carnegie Mellon expert claiming we are years away? Part of the explanation is that there is a controversy within the self-driving research community over the choice of technologies. Some think that everything should be on board the car, while others think self-driving cars will only work if they are in wireless communication with other cars and infrastructure. Claims that the former are optimistic seem to come from the latter who want to hold out for the communications systems.

It is also possible that there are some sour grapes here. In February, 2015, Uber agreed to partner with Carnegie Mellon to develop self-driving cars. But just four months later, Uber poached 40 of Carnegie Mellon’s top robotics researchers, offering huge bonuses and pay increases–not exactly behavior you’d like to see in a partner. Dr. Rajkumar may be angry that Uber stole his department. Or he may be angry that he wasn’t hired to go with the rest of them.

No matter what the explanation, I remain convinced that self-driving cars will be available early in the next decade, if only because I’ve been in self-driving cars during this decade and they worked fine. I expect that cars entering the market will be heavily reliant on maps, but that isn’t necessarily a defect as they will also have plenty of other devices to detect other vehicles, pedestrians, and anything else that isn’t on the map. We’ll see what happens.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

8 Responses to How Long Before Cars Drive Themselves?

  1. OFP2003 says:

    Global Warming/Climate Change apologists claim satellites in orbit around our planet can measure to a millimeter the levels of the ocean (I don’t know what they are measuring them against). So surely similar technology can locate potholes on city streets within millimeters and help these self-driving cars avoid the pot holes/construction zones/bridges that are deflecting more than 1 millimeter/and other road hazards.

  2. CapitalistRoader says:

    Ford’s proposal to make cars with no option for a human driver means those cars cannot leave the mapped areas.

    That’s OK even if rural mapping takes a very long time. Some very large percent of auto trips take place within major metro areas. That AVs can’t immediately transit the entire country is not an impediment to their adoption. Let the trucking industry be the early adopters for rural AVs. Road trains headed by a human driver would probably work until the bugs are worked out of rural mapping.

    Some think that everything should be on board the car, while others think self-driving cars will only work if they are in wireless communication with other cars and infrastructure.

    Car-to-car communication is a no brainer. Potholes/lane closures/accidents can be instantly communicated by AVs to other AVs, rerouting traffic around the obstruction. Infrastructure comms are fine for parking lots, etc., that can’t be mapped in real time e.g., the AV will get a map update from the garage as it enters to show available spaces. Not a big deal though as AVs won’t typically be parking–they’ll just drop off. Picking the shortest line in a drive up banking facility is probably a better example where infrastructure comms would come in handy.

    But government infrastructure comms? Just opportunity for graft. There’s no need for it. At most we might have the equivalent of an Amber Alert for highway accidents or closures, and there’s no need for that to service be a government monopoly.

  3. prk166 says:

    BTW, Mapillary is working with HERE on some stuff. http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2016/08/25/here-pilot.html

    Any of you interested in mapping, you can use Mapillary to photo map your street, your neighborhood, your city. Whatever you want to map, you can contribute to Mapillary. It’s 100% crowd sourced and a great tool for the open street map geeks to use to update their data.

  4. prk166 says:

    “Car-to-car communication is a no brainer. ” ~ CapilatilstRoader

    Car to car communication is a security nightmare. Cars can gather that information and share it without direct communication.

  5. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    This just in, and shared on the basis of “quote without comment” from the Washington Post: Driverless future? Not so fast say Americans

    The first few paragraphs:

    Americans prefer the option to drive, even in a world where cars can drive themselves.

    A new study from Kelley Blue Book shows how Americans’ affinity for driving could slow the adoption of driverless vehicle technology in the United States. Rather than fully autonomous vehicles, Americans prefer cars equipped with self-driving capabilities, but with the capability to butt-in as desired.

    That’s a striking conclusion for those preparing for a fully driverless future. Lyft recently expressed its belief that private vehicle ownership would be phased out in major cities by 2025, largely because of self-driving cars.

  6. Frank says:

    Thanks for sharing that C.P. It makes a lot of sense. I can’t see the fun on off-road 4x4ing when it’s automated.

  7. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Frank wrote:

    Thanks for sharing that C.P. It makes a lot of sense. I can’t see the fun on off-road 4x4ing when it’s automated.

    Thanks for the kind comment.

    Somehow I doubt that those 4×4 tracks and trails will be in the digital map files needed for self-driving vehicles anyway. Especially if they are tracks or trails that are explicitly posted that drivers need 4×4 and/or high ground clearance.

  8. CapitalistRoader says:

    I suspect a survey of people in the early 1980s would have the majority of people saying that having a portable telephone would be terrible because they’d be constantly hounded with phone calls while away from home.

    The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.
    – Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford’s lawyer Horace Rackham in 1903. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

    That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
    – Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909.

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