State Of Autonomy: November Recap
Every month, I recap the news articles I’ve consumed around autonomous vehicles, calling out the highlights and keeping track of market projections. This is also your chance, dear readers, to nominate a topic for discussion in the following month. If you’re interested in a broader and darker conversation around human obsolescence, try subscribing to my newsletter, The Whimper.
For those who don’t salivate over Uber and Apple gossip, twas a slow news month with one major exception: Waymo announced a commercial milestone in which its robotaxi public trial will move the safety engineer to the back seat, and eventually out of the car. That means everyday schmucks like you and me, being chauffeured around by a machine on public roads, with no physical supervision.
It’s easy to be mystified by all the convoluted claims of how autonomous vehicles will come to market and change transportation; Waymo’s approach to date should serve as a beacon of clarity. The better the software gets, the less human interference is required, the more freedom the software is allowed. It’s predictably incremental, with all the technological innovation and sociopolitical confrontation conveniently tucked out of sight. In this announcement, you can literally see the progress, with the engineer moving from the front seat to the back and finally out of the vehicle entirely.
We can also observe that progress in a quantifiable manner: while there’s no real metric anyone can rely on to say one technology is superior to another, the least-wrong proxy we have going right now is the number of disengagements (driver overrides) per thousand miles. That’s a figure California legislators demanded of companies testing autonomous cars on their public roads, and the chart below implies how well Waymo’s robot brain is performing relative to competing software.
As I said, this is only the least-wrong metric. It still sucks for comparison, but it sucks far less than comparing the number of patents these companies hold.
This Month’s Highlights:
- Waymo Announces Unmanned Public Trials
- Trump Administration Shelves V2V Mandate
- UK 2018 Budget Includes Funding For AV & EV Commercialization
- Waymo Announces Partnership With U.S.’ Largest Car Dealer Group
- Zoox Provides First Ride-Along To Media
- HERE (Owned By BMW, Audi And Mercedes) Acquires ATS, An Over-The-Air Technology Company
- Qualcomm, Ford, Nokia And AT&T To Trial Connected Vehicle Technology In San Diego
- Apple Publishes Research On Innovative 3D Object Detection
- Self-Driving Truck Startup TuSimple Raises $55MM From Chinese Investors And NVIDIA
Market Predictions:
GM Moved To Self-Piloted, 2019, Public Trial: In the fanciest manner possible, GM announced that they’ve moved up their hypothetical timetable for (as yet undefined) self-driving capability on a commercial scale. Part and parcel of that news was a media ride-along event in their Cruise test vehicles, which didn’t necessarily impress anyone but got the PR job done.
On an unrelated note, I will likely develop a new chart next month to track these commercialization projections. Things are getting a bit cramped here, and I don’t expect these companies’ marketing teams to make things any easier in the coming years.
Chinese Government Added To Autonomous, 2025, Speculation: Yep, the Chinese Government itself has a prediction for when Level 4/5ish vehicles will hit their roads as a utility, and that prediction is 2025.
Coming In December:
- I Hacked A Neighborhood With Microsoft Word
- Your suggestion? Send a tweet to Mitch Turck
Reactions From The Public:
Re: Waymo’s Launch Of Unmanned Self-Driving Taxi Service
