💡Wrong direction

The roadmap for self-driving cars has led them up a blind alley

My friend John Thornhill reports in the Financial Times that the self-driving robotaxi dream is coming unstuck:

the industry still has little idea what to do with the technology, despite some big advances over the past decade. As the much-hyped, seven-year quest to develop a driverless Uber service has suffered several setbacks, the appetite is now switching beyond robotaxis in search of more profitable avenues.

In essence, the task has proven to be too difficult. Cities are complicated, pedestrians tricky, the environmental context just too full of weirdnesses for today’s technology to be able to cope.

(An early Google Waymo car pictured by me in 2015.)

It strikes me that the fundamental issue with this particular technology is that the commercialisers, Waymo, Zoox, Cruise, Drive and others, have taken a route of high-end disruption. That is, they have gone after the hardest most complex part of the market: urban driving.

Hard because

• it is the most difficult type of driving to manage. …