Christopher Mims
To judge by recent claims, "fully autonomous" self-driving
technology is just around the corner. Uber Technologies Inc. is
offering Pittsburgh residents rides in autonomous Ford Fusions.
Ford Motor Co., BMW AG, Volvo Car Corp. and Lyft Inc. say they will
produce fully autonomous vehicles by 2021 or sooner. Tesla Motors
Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk, rarely topped in hyperbole, says
the technology will be here within 24 months.
To many industry insiders, these claims are largely hype.
They're not false, but they abuse the terms "autonomous vehicle"
and "self-driving," which evoke images of hopping into a car,
entering a destination and disappearing into sleep, food or our
phones.
That is not what we're going to get by 2021. It won't happen for
a long time, maybe decades.
"These statements are aspirations, they're not really reality,"
says Raj Rajkumar, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon
University, who collaborates with General Motors Co. "The
technology just isn't there....There's still a long way to go
before we can take the driver away from the driver's seat."
Dr. Rajkumar is hardly alone in his skepticism. Mary Cummings, a
professor of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering at
Duke University, says a fully autonomous car "operates by itself
under all conditions, period." She adds, "We're a good 15 to 20
years out from that."
Chris Urmson knows the field as well as anyone, having led the
self-driving car project at Google parent Alphabet Inc. for more
than seven years before departing in August. Last March, he told
the SXSW conference that self-driving technology will arrive for
some of us in a few years, and for the rest of us in 30. That is,
it could arrive soon for very specific uses; but as a full-bore
replacement for humans, it will take a long time.
In other words, it is all about how you define "autonomous" and
"self-driving."
"I always remind people we've had driverless vehicles carrying
people between terminals at an airport for 40 years," says Steven
Shladover, manager of the Partners for Advanced Transportation
Technology program at the University of California, Berkeley. "But
they're operating in a very well protected right of way."
Ford, for example, has said it would release a self-driving car
by 2021. Dig into the statements and press for details, 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. Ford declines to say how big
those areas will be.
Lyft is collaborating with GM and says it will introduce fully
self-driving cars by 2021. But co-founder John Zimmer says the
vehicles will be limited to a specific geographic area and a top
speed of 25 miles an hour.
Representatives of Volvo and Israel's Mobileye NV, which makes
self-driving technology and is collaborating with Intel and BMW,
will impose similar limits on their coming self-driving vehicles.
Volvo's cars might refuse to go into self-driving mode on roads
that are insufficiently mapped, says Erik Coelingh, the technical
lead on Volvo's self-driving car efforts. The cars will pull over
to the side of the road, or come to a stop, if inclement weather
impedes the vehicle's perceptual abilities, Mr. Coelingh says.
That is a scary thought -- and one reason why early "fully
autonomous" cars will require monitoring by humans.
It is worth noting that Google, the company with the most
experience with self-driving technology, is among the most
cautious. Google has yet to announce a release date for its
self-driving vehicles, though it plans to soon begin tests in Fiat
Chrysler minivans .
In the near term, "self-driving" cars will resemble Teslas, with
their "traffic-aware cruise control" that can maintain a safe
following distance, change lanes and stop in an emergency. Then
we're likely to see vehicles that don't require drivers but can
only operate on a fixed, well-mapped route in cities with fair
weather, such as from the airport to the Las Vegas Strip.
But the consensus of those I interviewed is that it will be many
years before we get cars that can truly go anywhere.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Amnon Shashua, co-founder and
chief technology officer of Mobileye, says that the problem of
sensing and controlling in self-driving cars is mostly solved.
Perfecting these systems won't require scientific breakthroughs, he
says -- just many small improvements in the software, gleaned from
watching humans drive in the real world.
"The ingredients exist; now it is a matter of engineering," Mr.
Shashua says.
Even the skeptics agree that self-driving technology is coming,
will save lives and eventually become part of nearly all vehicles.
But don't expect it by 2021.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 25, 2016 12:58 ET (16:58 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.