The Autonomous Car of the Future?

There’s a good article at Slate on the strengths and weaknesses of the Google car:

A good technology demonstration so wows you with what the product can do that you might forget to ask about what it can’t. Case in point: Google’s self-driving car. There is a surprisingly long list of the things the car can’t do, like avoid potholes or operate in heavy rain or snow. Yet a consensus has emerged among many technologists, policymakers, and journalists that Google has essentially solved—or is on the verge of solving—all of the major issues involved with robotic driving. The Economist believes that “the technology seems likely to be ready before all the questions of regulation and liability have been sorted out.” The New York Times declared that “autonomous vehicles like the one Google is building will be able to pack roads more efficiently”—up to eight times so. Google co-founder Sergey Brin forecast in 2012 that self-driving cars would be ready in five years, and in May, said he still hoped that his original prediction would come true.

But what Google is working on may instead result in the automotive equivalent of the Apple Newton, what one Web commenter called a “timid, skittish robot car whose inferior level of intelligence becomes a daily annoyance.” To be able to handle the everyday stresses and strains of the real driving world, the Google car will require a computer with a level of intelligence that machines won’t have for many years, if ever.

I’ll continue to bet a shiny new dime that there won’t be a single street legal autonomous car with an ordinary, non-experimental license on the streets of Chicago within the next five years. My guess as to the fate of the technology is that it will always be an ancillary technology—useful for parking and some other chores but not the way most people drive most of the time—and the car of the future.

I also continue to believe that even if the technological hurdles are overcome the regulatory and liability issues will kill truly autonomous cars except where they’re the only things on the road which, as has been pointed out, is called a railroad.