Transition To Autonomous Cars Will Take Longer Than You Think, Waymo CEO Tells Governors

[FrodosNewPet]

Transition To Autonomous Cars Will Take Longer Than You Think, Waymo CEO Tells Governors

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabu...ernors-av-time-will-be-longer-than-you-think/

Sam Abuelsamid - Jul 20, 2018,1:07 pm

Speaking in a fireside chat at the National Governors Association meeting Friday, Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the gathering that the “time period will be longer than you think” for automated vehicles to be everywhere. Krafcik spent his conversation with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval emphasizing the need for safety in developing automated driving systems and at the same time tempering some of the expectations caused by the hype around this technology.

Krafcik praised the progress that has been made on safety in recent decades including the installation of 8 to 10 airbags in every new vehicle and the adoption of a range of active safety and driver assist technologies like automatic emergency braking and stability control. He also offered some thoughts on why we actually seem to be going backwards on road safety in the last few years with an increasing number of fatalities.

“There are no autonomous systems available, zero on the road today,” said Krafcik. “Anything you can buy on the road today is a driver assist system, that means the driver is completely responsible for the car and I think there is so much confusion on that.”

~ snip ~

Despite the rapid accumulation of testing miles, Krafcik warned the governors not to end all of their infrastructure investments just yet. Responding to a question about the need for new parking facilities, he responded that there will be a very long period of overlap between personally owned human driven vehicles and shared automated vehicles from Waymo and others. He suggested that it might be possible to slow down on some massive parking structures but was non-committal on timelines.

~ snip ~

[dalton99a]

1. I actually want flying cars

to saturate the sky and blot out the sun

[TeamPooka]

2. I have no desire to be on the road with a bunch of robots

[redstateblues]

3. Probably safer than a bunch of drivers checking email and texting

[Tommy_Carcetti]

4. But I'm pretty sure it will be the number one issue of the 2016 election. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

5. No shit, Sherlock. The whole idea has been grossly oversold.

Even SF authors who proposed autonomous transit usually assumed "virtual rails" or other such infrastructure which freed drivers from the mundane task of pointing the vehicle in the right direction from one second to the next. Such devices constrain the path of vehicles so sharply that there are relatively few decisions for the driver to make. Just input the destination and it lays out a path, then follows it. Real-time AI decision-making usually isn't part of that picture -- just simple obstacle detection and avoidance, and a driver override.

Fully autonomous vehicles might be pretty nice for space probes and the insides of flaming petroleum refineries or volcanoes, but they won't be suitable for either highways or local roads for a long, long time.