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Why driverless cars are still far away


NEW YORK: A year ago, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road in 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars.

Most of those cars have yet to arrive — and it is likely to be years before they do. Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than they thought.

Ford and Volkswagen said on Friday that they were teaming up to tackle the self-driving challenge. The two automakers plan to use autonomous-vehicle technology from Argo AI, in ride-sharing services in a few urban zones as early as 2021. But Argo’s CEO, Bryan Salesky, said the industry’s bigger promise of creating driverless cars that could go anywhere was “way in the future”.

He and others attribute the delay to something as obvious as it is stubborn: human behaviour.

Researchers at Argo say the cars they are testing have to navigate unexpected situations every day. A year ago, many industry executives exuded much greater certainty. They thought that their engineers had solved the most vexing technical problems.

China, which has the world’s largest auto market and is investing heavily in electric vehicles, is trailing in development of self-driving cars, analysts say. The country allows automakers to test such cars on public roads in only a handful of cities. One leading Chinese company working on autonomous technology, Baidu, is doing much of its research at a lab in Silicon Valley.

Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, are nearly alone in predicting widespread use of self-driving cars within the next year. In April, Musk said Tesla would have as many as a million autonomous “robo taxis” by the end of 2020.

Tesla believes its new self-driving system, based on a computer chip it designed, and the data it gathers from Tesla cars now on the road will enable the company to start offering fully autonomous driving next year.





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