Self-Driving Skepticism

Christian Wolmar writes a skeptical response to the rapid adoption of self-driving car enthusiasm by politicians, the public, and the journalists whose job it is to be skeptical of silver bullets.

If the more extreme claims were to be believed, we would already be adapting to the new reality of driverless cars. And what a reality it is supposed to be. We are told by the likes of Uber and Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicles wing, that we will forego our individual cars for the delights of being transported in driver-less, shared-use electric vehicles reminiscent of the new dockless hire bikes or car–sharing companies like Zipcar. This is a strange conflation of three separate revolutions, electric, shared use and driverless, each of which on its own would have enormous societal impact and yet are presented by the tech companies and some politicians as desirable and inevitable. In truth, all three concepts are fraught with obstacles, not least the shortage of battery capacity in the world, people’s natural desire to own their own vehicles, and everyone’s understandable hesitance about putting their lives in the hands of a computer.

Wolmar writes after attending an autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart, where there was plenty of evidence for autonomous vehicle technology skepticism, whether or not there are many people willing or able to recognize it as such. To be fair however, Wolmar did encounter "more doomsayers than purveyors of the autonomous driving dream."