Driverless Car Update

San Francisco may soon have two self-driving taxi services as Waymo and Cruise have applied to begin such operations in May. Perhaps not coincidentally, this has been accompanied by a spate of complaints that self-driving cars have been unable to deal with San Francisco’s fog, are delaying buses, and unexpectedly stop in the middle of traffic.

Meanwhile, in London, Bill Gates recently tested an experimental driverless car developed by a company called Wayve and was very happy with the results. Unlike Cruise and Waymo’s cars, which depend heavily on detailed maps of roads and terrain, the London cars just learn to deal with traffic like any human driver. That means that, once they can drive in London, they’ll be able to drive in any city in Great Britain without any further preparatory work.

One thing that has bothered me about the Cruise/Waymo cars is that they aren’t completely driverless. Instead, every car is remotely monitored by a human who is supposed to be able to take over if the cars get into a situation it doesn’t understand. It may be that the delays that people are complaining about are due to the remote workers trying to monitor too many cars at once.

I don’t know if Wayve has remote monitors, but if not their technology may be the one that prevails. In any case, while we aren’t getting driverless cars as soon as some people hoped, we may get them sooner than some people think today.