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A future derailed
The problem, ironically enough, is the “dude in the car.”
I remember when then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick shocked an audience at the Code Conference in 2014 by proclaiming that his company needed to get rid of human drivers and replace them with robot taxis to become profitable.
The self-driving future has been slow to arrive, which seems particularly tragic now: Robot taxis would eliminate the risk of infection spreading from passenger to driver to passenger, and presumably be easier to sanitize routinely, even between every ride.
Instead, the coronavirus pandemic has slowed or stopped progress in testing autonomous vehicles. There are two issues: First, testing generally requires two safety engineers in a car. That can’t be done safely now.
Second, the pandemic has emptied out city streets. Testing cars now would be nearly meaningless, without what we’d like to think are real-world conditions.
There is a way to test cars virtually: Essentially, you put the AI in a simulation, feeding it sensor data from a made-up, digital cityscape. Waymo said last month that it had driven 15 billion miles in such simulations, built from data generated by 20 million real miles on the road. Cruise recently said it runs 30,000 tests a day.
I think this will freeze the self-driving race where it is, with Waymo and Cruise well in the lead, and others scrambling to catch up. Uber is closing the Pier 70 headquarters for its self-driving division, which was preparing to bring its autonomous vehicles back to local roads after getting a new permit for road testing in California. Lyft had only recently started road testing, though it is still hiring for its self-driving lab in Palo Alto.
The other big question hanging over self-driving cars: Will commuting ever return to what it was? With big Bay Area employers slow to bring workers back to the office, there simply may not be the demand that spurred self-driving inventors’ ambitions. Technology has met its match: The coronavirus is at the wheel now.
— Owen Thomas, othomas@sfchronicle.com
Quote of the week
“I was the sponsor of this deal, and data was not the motivation.” — Instagram head Adam Mosseri, offering in a tweet the most persuasive argument yet that data was the motivation for Facebook to buy GIF app maker Giphy
Coming up
Earnings for Nvidia and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise are Thursday.
What I’m reading
Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn interview Google (and Alphabet) CEO Sundar Pichai on future hardware, returning to the Googleplex, and fighting the pandemic. (The Verge)
Roland Li on Salesforce’s plan to reopen its downtown San Francisco campus. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Megan Graham shows how easy it is trick online advertising companies with stolen articles. (CNBC)
Tech Chronicle is a weekly newsletter from Owen Thomas, The Chronicle’s business editor, and the rest of the tech team. Follow along on Twitter: @techchronicle and Instagram: @techchronicle
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May 20, 2020 at 06:33PM
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Self-driving cars aren't in control of their own future - San Francisco Chronicle
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