Driverless Vehicles Abound, But Not Taking Over The Roads
By Bruce Haring
San Francisco city records cited by The Washington Post indicate that self-driving Waymo vehicles have been hit with 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year. The fines were issued for such infractions as blocking traffic to street-cleaning violations.
But that’s the least of the problems for the driverless vehicles.
By 2025, we were predicted to live in a world where self-driving cars would make things like driver’s licenses and automobile ownership relics of an earlier age.
But concerns over safety, charging, hacking and other issues still have to be overcome. And each time something goes wrong with an autonomous vehicle’s travels, the resulting uproar sets back a more widespread rollout.
While self-driving cars aren’t taking over the world’s roads just yet, there remains some hope for the future.
Self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles, as some call them, are now available in cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Beijing, Hamburg and San Francisco. Companies behind self-driving cars include Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox, and in cities where the vehicles are already in use, their presence on the road is fairly routine.
The problem is that many expected self-driving cars to be everywhere by now. That perception versus reality, along with some infrastructure issues and tech glitches, have hampered acceptance.
SKEPTICISM ABOUNDS
By 2021, investors had plowed an estimated $100 billion into development of self-driving cars, according to a McKinsey & Co. report.
But further investment is drying up as time passes and rollouts remain small.
“The autonomous vehicle industry — particularly the companies developing and testing robotaxis — has gotten away for too long with selling a vision of the future that they should know perfectly well is never going to come to pass,” wrote Sam Anthony, cofounder and CTO of now-defunct Perceptive Automata, in his newsletter in 2022.
The respected Consumer Reports magazine also voiced concerns. The magazine wrote that automakers “should take stronger steps to ensure that vehicles with these systems are designed, deployed, and marketed safely.”
The Brookings Institute agreed. “Despite improvements in self-driving technology, the best conclusion for now seems to be that the safety advantages of self-driving cars are aspirational but have not been proven.”
But the biggest issues seem to center on human reactions to giving up their control.
OVERCOMING BARRIERS
Harvard Business Review said human bias on their own driving skills needs to be dealt with before autonomous vehicles blossom. Research indicates that better communication on the benefits of autonomous vehicles can possibly overcome mistrust on surrendering control.
That research suggests incentives.
“Inducements — such as insurance discounts, tax breaks, and reserved lanes for consumers who adopt automated vehicles — could lead consumers to focus less on what they lose by riding in an automated vehicle (especially their sense of control) and focus more on all the benefits they gain given such incentives. At the end of the day, people may be willing to trade off their discomfort with riding in automated vehicles for attractive benefits.”
The University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab and the Mobility Innovation Center reached similar conclusions in its Driverless Seattle (PDF), a report that breaks down some common misconceptions on the vehicles, including their safety.
Studies like that, good performance in the cities that already have them, and resolving a few issues on navigating inclement weather should likely bolster self-driving vehicle acceptance.
But what the timeline is for more widespread use of autonomous vehicles remains to be seen.