By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeare

Dude, where’s my self-driving car?

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2024-02-13 14:30:04

By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

In 2015, the then-lead of Google’s self-driving car project Chris Urmson said one of his goals in developing a fully driverless vehicle was to make sure that his 11-year-old son would never need a driver’s license.

The subtext was that in five years, when Urmson’s son turned 16, self-driving cars would be so ubiquitous, and the technology would be so superior to human driving, that his teenage son would have no need nor desire to learn to drive himself.

One of the hallmarks of the race to develop autonomous vehicles has been wildly optimistic predictions about when they’ll be ready for daily use. The landscape is positively littered with missed deadlines.

In 2015, Baidu senior VP Wang Jing said the tech company would be selling self-driving cars to Chinese customers by 2020. In 2016, then-Lyft president John Zimmer claimed that “a majority” of the trips taking place on its ride-sharing network would be in fully driverless cars “within five years.” That same year, Business Insider said that 10 million autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020.