Just keep in mind who actually makes money in gold rushes.
From Backchannel:
A crowded field of car companies, tech giants, and startups is racing to get self-driving cars into the hands of drivers ASAP.
Blink and you might miss
the moment automated vehicles go mainstream. At some point in 2017, a
fully autonomous Tesla will blast across the country en route from Los
Angeles to New York. The person sitting in the front left seat — let’s
no longer call her the driver — will be free to watch a movie, drink a
latte, or wave to locals as she zips past. If Elon Musk has his way, the
tech will then roll out to drivers in 2018.
That
timeline might be optimistic, but at least one thing is clear: 2017 is
the year in which self-driving cars of numerous makes will embark on
ambitious rounds of testing. Both Ford and BMW will send their
autonomous cars through their paces in Europe. VW just launched its
smart mobility brand Moia, with a focus on self-driving shuttles, and
Volvo is pushing ahead with plans to give 100 self-driving XC90 crossovers to consumers in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Not
to be outdone, the big technology firms are also sending their cars out
into the world. Baidu has started offering public rides along a
two-mile stretch of road in China, while Uber will likely expand its
passenger trials beyond Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Lyft and even
Apple are likely to make self-driving news in the coming year, as well.
This
rush to deployment has caught some industry watchers by surprise. For
years, a single company — Google — had hogged the headlines for
tinkering with robotic vehicles and quietly wooing regulators. Then, in
2015, a horde of startups and newcomers burst onto the scene, eager to
explore the boundaries of self-driving technologies—and the rules
surrounding them.
“2017
will show us that limited deployments are technically, legally, and
socially possible, even under today’s laws,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a
professor at the University of South Carolina.
The
cars themselves, with their distinctive sensor rigs mounted onto their
rooftops, will be most visible as they putter down our roads. Behind the
scenes, their makers are hurrying to iron out the technical,
regulatory, and economic details needed so that one day somewhat soon,
most of us will get to take our stupendously fallible meat gloves off
the wheel.
From the tech side,
this reality seems imminent. The prices of these cars’ most important
sensors are plummeting. Laser-ranging lidar units — the things that
build up a 3D image of the car’s surroundings — used to cost multiples
of the cars on which they were mounted. Now they are priced in the
thousands or even hundreds of dollars. Radars, which help pinpoint other
road users, are also getting smaller and cheaper, and today’s
high-definition video cameras are so cheap they are almost free.
New approaches are around the corner, too. Israeli startup Oryx Vision
is working on what it calls coherent optical radar, a system that uses a
terahertz infrared laser and clever microscopic antennas to scan the
roadway further ahead and in more detail than lidar — and without the
danger of being blinded by sunlight or fog. It hopes to build a demo
unit by the end of 2017 with thousands of tiny nanoantennas on a chip,
eventually costing just a few dollars.
The
price drops and gains in performance amount to “a continuous stream of
significant advancements in all perception-related technologies,” says
Bobby Hambrick, CEO of AutonomouStuff, a supplier of automotive
technologies.
The
computing power to handle this firehose of sensor data is also becoming
more widely accessible. Nvidia now offers an off-the-shelf Drive PX 2
self-driving computing platform, which is likely to feature in robocars
from Tesla, Baidu, and others. But it faces stiff competition from
automotive suppliers Bosch and Delphi, as well as two Bay Area startups
founded by ex-Googlers — Nuro.ai and an as-yet-unnamed company being run
by the company’s well-respected former self-driving car lead, Chris
Urmson.
And
then of course there is Google itself, which has finally spun out its
58 autonomous vehicles, two million miles of self-driving experience,
and legion of engineers into a standalone company called Waymo. Waymo seems to be focusing on partnerships with car makers rather than developing its own self-driving prototype.
For
this is 2017’s real prize: to develop an operating system that can
scale beyond a few experimental autonomous cars to power tomorrow’s
mass-produced self-driving fleets. Waymo’s first step in that direction
is a partnership with Fiat Chrysler that will evolve next year into a
ridesharing scheme using 100 Pacifica minivans.
Waymo
has so far shown no inclination to hand over its platform for free, as
Google did with its Android smartphone software. But there are others
who believe that collaboration and even open sourcing are the future of
autonomous transportation.
The notoriously secretive Apple recently suggested
to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that companies
should share de-identified data from crashes and near misses, while
Comma.ai founder George Hotz has released open-source software and hardware for lane keeping assist and adaptive cruise control.
Hotz
thinks that Comma.ai’s software could become the Android of
self-driving cars, used by a network of car makers to which it can later
provide profitable services. At the very least, making code and data
freely available should prime the next generation of autonomous
engineers.
Udacity, an online education provider that offers rapid qualifications in high-tech subjects, has released 238GB of driving data to self-driving self-starters, while the Japanese Autoware
project offers a full autonomous software stack for free. “We’ll
continue to see more momentum around the open-sourcing of self-driving
car tech, and more releases of open driving datasets,” says Oliver
Cameron, head of Udacity’s self-driving program.
The
first to benefit from cheaper, turnkey self-driving solutions could be
the youngest car makers. Startups Lucid Motors, LeEco, and NextEV have
recently unveiled luxury cars with self-driving hardware, to be followed
at January’s CES show by Faraday Future. All are controlled by or have
significant investment from Chinese firms, and all have been subject to
questions about funding their prototype vehicles through to production....MUCH MORE
