Self-Driving Cars: Where Are We?

If you scan the headlines of business or financial media, you have undoubtedly encountered news about the autonomous car revolution. By doing this, it is easy to think that we are on the cusp of being able to get into our self-driving cars and being driven to wherever we desire.

The current landscape is more complicated. Yes, autonomous vehicles still promise to transform the way we travel. Major companies and significant amounts of capital have been allocated to turn this vision into reality. But having said that, there are several issues that are standing in the way of a future where the “standard” vehicle is autonomous.

First, the good news. There are many auto and tech companies that are developing autonomous vehicle technology. From major auto manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Tesla to tech juggernauts like Google, Apple and Uber, billions of dollars are being spent to develop reliable, safe self-driving vehicles. Already, some of these companies are making progress. For instance, you may have a vehicle that can automatically parallel park. These limited use cases are promising and have already made drivers’ lives easier.

But what about complete autonomy? Fully-driverless technology is still in the advanced testing stages. One of the more notable examples is Tesla Motors’ autopilot mode. While Tesla has gathered millions of miles of data from real-life drivers, the technology isn’t flawless. Several deaths have occurred in Tesla vehicles that had autopilot engaged. The company has disputed that faulty autopilot software caused the crashes, but the fact remains that deaths have already occurred in self-driving vehicles.

There are several key challenges that are preventing self-driving cars from becoming ubiquitous. Autonomous cars in their current state simply replace human eyes with sensors, and these sensors can struggle with extreme weather, extreme sunlight, and defective traffic lights. We as humans are also a major challenge in the advancement of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are not simply going to be everywhere one day. They will be slowly rolled out, and in the meantime, human drivers are unpredictable, which can remove the promise of safety from self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles must also handle interactions with pedestrians, which is more difficult than expected.

Major corporations and extremely intelligent engineers are working to address these problems. In all likelihood, there will be more unexpected issues that engineers will need to solve. The self-driving car revolution will not arrive in one fell swoop. Rather, it will be an iterative process that will require much patience.

The self-driving car revolution is likely inevitable. We believe that this will be an extremely positive development. Instead of spending time driving, we can use that time for more important things (like working or playing). However, to achieve this vision, there will be growing pains. This is to be expected. We are living in an age of companies leveraging disruptive technologies, from Tesla’s efforts to develop a fully-autonomous vehicle to our work at carVertical, where we leverage blockchain technology to track a vehicle’s history.

Ultimately, we are living in a tremendously exciting time. While patience is necessary, we can’t wait to see what happens next.