Driverless Cars Were Supposed To Take On Roads By Now: What’s Keeping Them At Bay?
If Arthur Weasley were a part of today’s world, he would say that technology is a broken muggles’ wand that may or may not turn dreams into reality. If you asked anyone about self-driving vehicles or autonomous driving cars 2-3 decades back, they would jump with joy at an idea that may change the world for good in the future. But now, we are standing in a world that is moving back and forth with the idea of driverless cars. The driverless market is anticipated to experience substantial growth in the coming years, projected to reach a size of nearly $62 billion in the year 2026.
If the recent developments are summarized, the claims made by all the big players, including Ford, Tesla, Google, and Lyft, seem to drift back and forth with every passing year. Ford recently reported losing billions in a self-driving startup.
Along the same lines, Volkswagen pulled the plug on its driverless project.
Tesla has been making claims since 2017 about making selfless cars a reality, but regulators are currently investigating it for rear-ending halted emergency vehicles on roads and its automated vehicle’s inability to identify motorcycles.
Au contraire, Google’s Waymo works at level 4 autonomy and has been working well as a robotaxi in the state of Arizona for quite some time now. If you are in Phoenix any day, you can always book yourself a Waymo and enjoy the driverless ride. Similarly, the University of Michigan has created a Mcity Test Facility where global players like Ford are testing the limits of their autonomous vehicles. This fake city, whose size equates to 24 football fields, is providing a controlled environment for testing autonomous technologies. Then there are those who are focusing on developing driverless loading vehicles for highways and making that journey a smoother and safer one.
Autonomous Driving: Where Exactly Does The Problem Lie?
- High Expenses: At the moment, economics does not favor autonomous vehicles. These system frameworks’ development, innovation, and evolution require deep, long-term collaborations between governments, carmakers, telecom companies, and innovators. The mad rush to automate first is not alone enough to finance this cause, nor is it within the financial capability of any single party. McKinsey states that over $10 billion has been invested in driverless projects in the last decades. Intel claimed that the market evaluation would go up to $10 trillion as driverless cars join the mainstream world. However, consumer and market trust is currently taking a backseat to these projects. Even LiDAR-developing companies like Ouster, Luminar, and Velodyne are making attempts to recover from the steep stock crashes.
- Legal And Policy Matters: Autonomous driving has a crystal clear relationship with safety. The deployment of these vehicles will need strict regulatory changes and new policies. It is a huge complication that can delay the commercialization of AVs for years. While the AV designers make a compelling case by stating that AVs will eliminate the chances of human error, which is proven in 9 out of 10 accidents, who will take the blame when an AV crashes into another being or vehicle? Currently, researchers are conducting trials in controlled environments, which cannot serve as the basis for statistical conclusions regarding road safety.
Additional Issues Surfacing Autonomous Driving
- Cybersecurity: One of the biggest and most prominent concerns about AVs is cybersecurity. These vehicles will be permanently connected to a network that is not hard to crack. Any hacker can easily modify the algorithms in all automated systems within the vehicle. Even though carmakers and fleet owners are actively pursuing solutions, they have not yet resolved the problem.
- Artificial Intelligence Lacks The Intuitive and Perceptive Nature of the Human Brain: Driving is an intensely social process that requires alertness on all levels and complicated social interactions with street animals, pedestrians, cyclists, other drivers, etc. Human beings tend to behave impulsively and break the rules. How will the machines cope with such uncertainties? Artificial intelligence lacks common sense, general intelligence, and perceptive decision-making ability. Tesla’s undergoing investigation is a fine example of that.
- Data: Today’s partially autonomous cars generate 25 GB of data per minute that is sent back to the server for processing and storing all information. Imagine the amount of data generated by fully autonomous vehicles in the future and the kind of servers, data centers, and processing abilities we will need to manage all that information. Autonomous cars will generate more than 300 TB of data annually. Our world at present lacks the infrastructure and technology required to process and manage such huge amounts of data. The emergence of the 5G network gives some hope, but it is still far from home.
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Autonomous Driving: The Silver Lining
The purpose of this discussion is to acknowledge the hurdles and find ways to overcome them. Developers are prioritizing challenges to set the chronology of developments in a fruitful direction. For now, the biggest hurdle is teaching computers to predict, perceive, and analyze the unpredictable complexities of human environments. All innovators are currently focused on cracking this part of the puzzle.
The emergence of AVs will change regulations, insurance matters, and the overall transport system. All these changes need time to mature and take full effect. A plausible solution is to deploy driverless vehicles in dangerous environments such as nuclear plants, oil fields, and military areas. Another viable option is utilizing them in war-prone areas. It will restrict the dangers to human life. Additionally, it will give carmakers enough time and space to mature the technology for roads.
With limited speeds, we can start with lighter robotic vehicles on sidewalks and bike paths. This approach will allow people to adjust to them while enabling the machines to learn about human behavior. Such vehicles can also serve food and grocery deliveries, farming, fieldwork, conducting research in extreme weather conditions, and more. There are mixed opinions about the timeline of fully autonomous vehicles. However, we certainly wouldn’t be seeing them within the next 10-15 years. It may take a few decades before we start wondering how people survived with manually operated cars and vehicles. But still, it’s a long, long way to go.
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