Some companies are selling fully autonomous driving as one of the most promising markets of the next few years. However, ongoing problems have plagued its development and deployment.
In recent months, California has grabbed most of the headlines. Since 2022, its residents have been coexisting with self-driving car companies like Cruise, and the results have been far from satisfactory.
Introducing self-driving vehicles, such as driverless taxi services, has caused many problems in San Francisco. Waymo, for example, had to correct a mistake that sent dozens of cars down a dead-end street every day. Meanwhile, a Cruise car tried to flee from police after being pulled over for a traffic violation.
The incidents escalated so much that some citizens began to boycott autonomous cars, placing cones on them or wearing T-shirts with stop signs, which instantly stopped these vehicles.
These types of actions have multiplied as incidents involving self-driving have become more serious. Firefighters called for their removal after several cars came close to colliding with them, even accusing these cars of causing severe delays in their actions, which could mean the difference between saving a life or not.
The final straw came when a Cruise vehicle ran over a woman, parked on top of her, and dragged her across the road after a first vehicle had already hit her. This accident eventually led the California government to revoke the company’s license.
Recently, we’ve learned that Cruise’s return to California roads will cost it $112,500. According to Reuters, this number is a ridiculous expense for a company immersed in developing a technology that already costs more than $100 billion.
At the moment, autonomous cars are still getting into serious trouble. To get an idea of what the technology development entails, in 2018, BMW estimated the amount of information it collects in a day’s testing with each of its self-driving cars to be 40 TB of data.
Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the most significant advances in autonomous driving occur on highways. Despite the higher speeds, there are fewer variables to consider. The vehicle doesn’t have to deal with the same amount of information.
In the city, the problems for autonomous vehicles multiply. Bicycles, pedestrians, signals, and movement are much more unpredictable. China, which wanted to be a reference for this technology, is suffering.
China Already Knows What It Means to Let Self-Driving Cars on Its Roads
A few months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an emergency trip to China to negotiate with authorities on several issues affecting his company.
One of them was Autopilot. For Tesla, getting its vehicles to work correctly in an urban environment is a crucial turning point for its future, as it believes it will be a reason to buy and sell its cars to other manufacturers.
Tesla shares its interest in developing autonomous vehicles with China. In 2022, the government approved the company’s Pony.ai vehicles for operation. However, they were still driver-controlled at the time in case the driver needed to take the wheel.
In 2023, Didi—which is considered the Chinese Uber—and electric car company GAC Aion also announced that they’d compete with a driverless autonomous vehicle service by 2025. Over the past two years, China has been putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to driverless cars. Baidu, for example, is already partially operating in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Chongqing.
However, as ABC News reports one of the self-driving cars from Baidu—the company considered to be the Chinese Google and Tesla's partner for the deployment of Autopilot in China—has recently been involved in a hit-and-run of a pedestrian. When the vehicle ran over him, the pedestrian failed to obey a traffic light. The media outlet reports that the person hit by the car had no severe injuries.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Baidu’s Apollo Go service faces the same problems in China as Cruise does in the U.S. The outlet points out that a motorcycle driver caused the above incident. Meanwhile, NBC News states the driver ran a red light.
As Baidu grows in popularity, SCMP points out that voices against its expansion are multiplying. The company needs to start making money from the technology after a costly development. Still, again, it encounters a problem that's present everywhere in the world: the fact that humans are unpredictable.
The autonomous vehicle service works perfectly most of the time, and in a highly controlled environment, it can serve as a completely safe means of transportation. But when these cars are on the streets of a city, the chances of making a mistake multiply because it’s impossible to control whether a pedestrian or any other driver will do something illegal.
Image | Baidu
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