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Ford CEO Jim Hackett joined the rising ranks of vehicle and technology executives on Tuesday, saying that autonomous cars will not be delivered as fast as some expected.
The industry "overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles," Hackett told the Detroit Economic Club. While Ford is not unaware of its voluntary 2021 deadline for its first dedicated driverless car, Hackett acknowledged that "the vehicle applications will be close, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex. " Bloomberg earlier reported the comments.
Hackett is the latest high-level insider in the industry to have launched a public debate on the future prospects of autonomous cars, which in 2016 seemed imminent. Less than three years ago, Uber was showing a limited self-driving service in Pittsburgh, Google was transforming its driverless vehicle program into a company called Waymo, and Nissan was keeping its promise made in 2013 (by a very confident Carlos Ghosn) that she's a self-driving car by 2020. In 2016, General Motors also acquired the self-sustaining technology company Cruise Automation for $ 580 million. And Ford CEO at the time, Mark Fields, said the company would have thousands of fully autonomous vehicles for the urban carpool and motor vehicle fleets by 2021.
Now, Hackett and others recognize that industry marketing – and media titles – may have gotten ahead of the technology. Nowadays, executives make fewer and fewer promises about the arrival of autonomous driving.
In November, John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, said that "autonomy will always have constraints," and suggested that an autonomous car that could really go anywhere could never materialize. . Although Waymo's limited self-driving service in the suburbs of Phoenix is slowly growing at the local level, the company still places operators behind the wheel for safety reasons. "Driverless" is a stretch. The head of technology at Nissan's development center in Silicon Valley has now publicly ignored the concept of driverless vehicles, insisting that "an autonomous system without a human being" is "a useless system." (The former CEO, Ghosn, was arrested again by the Japanese authorities.)
After a collision during tests that killed an Arizona woman last year, Uber is back at the limited trials in Pittsburgh, with two operators on board. In an interview with Reuters this week, Raquel Urtasun, the chief scientist responsible for Uber's self-driving efforts, asked the question of when driverless vehicles would arrive at the issue of ## 147 ## $ 39 billion. "And the first thing I learned is the lack of timing, right?" She said.
Urtasun echoed an increasingly popular feeling among autonomous developers: it's not when autonomous cars will arrive but or. At the present time, the technology is designed to work in specific contexts: the sunlit highways of Arizona, the chaos of Boston, the sunny streets of Miami or the sprawling suburbs of San Jose. Urtasun said: "As if anticipating Hackett's comments," self-driving will begin in small areas and then we'll go from small to almost everywhere. The challenge is to make the transition as smooth as possible. Result: Unless you find yourself in one of these small areas, do not hold your breath for an autonomous car.
On the other hand, this other Detroit automaker General Motors said in November that it was "on track" to roll out an autonomous vehicle this year, although it did not say where it would be its first limited service. The company declined to comment on Hackett's statement.
What complicates autonomous driving? On the one hand, there is no federal regulation for technology, and states have struggled to fill the gap with their own test rules. Secondly, industry insiders say that sensors need to be improved – to "see" further at a lower cost – before the technology can be scaled up. And developers are always looking for better algorithms, those who can handle the uncertainty of new road situations without harming their cargo.
Ford, meanwhile, says he's still considering deploying a standalone vehicle to offer commercial service by 2021, in more than one US city. Along with Argo AI, in which it holds a controlling stake, the Detroit automaker conducts tests in the states of Michigan, Miami and Pittsburgh. Hackett also outlined plans to create a broader "mobility platform" – an operating system that would help cities manage autonomous cars as soon as they arrive.
Tesla, one of the engines of Silicon Valley, is one of the engines of the automobile that has not slowed down. Less than two months ago, the company again began selling its "full self-driving feature," a $ 5,000 supplement that it had removed from its website in October. CEO Elon Musk said the feature would be "complete" by the end of the year and fully available to customers by the end of 2020, theoretically allowing Tesla owners to Autopilot and watch their vehicles behave themselves in complex urban environments – or, as they wish, to fall asleep at the wheel. The CEO is used to not meeting his own deadlines, but Tesla is also reacting against the flock.
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