Where Is My Driverless Car?

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The pandemic has accelerated some long-predicted technology habits like telemedicine and online grocery shopping. But driverless car technology might be kicked into reverse.

The ubiquitous computer-driven car that seemed just around the corner for a decade is now further away than ever.

I want driverless cars to work. They could spare us a lot of needless death. But there are big obstacles to the technology, including that it doesn’t work so well (yet), threatens to bankrupt all but the richest companies that try it and might never solve many of the problems we hoped it would address.

The struggles of robot cars make me wonder if it’s possible to shoot for the moon with technology without shooting ourselves in the foot by hoping for magic.

We can blame the pandemic for some of the struggles. Testing of many computer-controlled cars is on pause to protect human minders from the coronavirus, and many companies can’t afford to splurge now on costly technology, the New York Times reporters Cade Metz and Erin Griffith wrote on Tuesday.

This is slowing driverless cars’ development, but as my colleagues wrote, the problems are bigger. We can’t blame the coronavirus for everything. The technology needed to make the cars safe is even harder to master than companies thought — and the problems the tech is trying to fix are even bigger.

I remember exactly where I was when I read The Times’s first reveal of Google’s computer-piloted cars 10 year ago. Driverless cars felt like a starry, life-saving advance that encapsulated the best of what tech can do.

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By: Shira Ovide
Title: Where Is My Driverless Car?
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/technology/driverless-cars.html
Published Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 16:44:50 +0000

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